this is the personal blog of brandon quintana.

There was a recent article on CNET News.com regarding monopoly issue against Microsoft, but this time by the search giant Google. With Internet Explorer 7 it puts the search on MSN and point more advertising dollars to that site due to its high volume of OS popularity. Google believes this is an unfair advantage in advertising.

Google believes that it limits the choice to MSN by default and users should have the ability to choose what to use. Microsoft’s stand on this is that it’s easy for users to change the default setting to another search engine.

It’s kind of funny to me. I use Firefox and the search is on Google by default. On initial installation, Firefox does not ask you what search you would like to use. In fact to get MSN in the pull down search menu the user has to go to the extensions website and download it.

I think people need to become more aware of their choices. If someone prefers Google as their search engine they should set their defaults to Google. If they like Google they can choose Firefox since it is already set by default. If users like MSN they can either choose to add it to Firefox or use IE 7, which uses it as its default. Its more in the hands of the user than anything else and when people make an active decision on what’s best for them these situations can be eliminated.