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Comment by yanw | Hacker News Reader

I'm not talking about ads I'm talking about ranking, and not even that, as ranking links doesn't really strike me as the way of the future, I'm referring to when Google shows a map for a location query and flight prices and schedules for a flight query as these are also search results and they are more useful (and prettier) so not only do I find nothing wrong with it but I find it to be the right way to go.

Also regarding that antitrust meme the Microsoft comparison keep getting mention, I'm not really familiar with that case but as I see it, Windows you buy and you are stuck with, Google on the other hand is free to use or not as you please.

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> flight prices and schedules for a flight query as these are also search results and they are more useful (and prettier) so not only do I find nothing wrong with it but I find it to be the right way to go.

Certainly you might not find anything wrong with it; but if Google were to show ITA flight information in search results, with a link to Google Travel (hypothetical) to purchase the ticket, Expedia, Kayak, and Travelocity might be a little unhappy.

> Windows you buy and you are stuck with, Google on the other hand is free to use or not as you please.

The consumer being "stuck" with Windows was never an issue in the Microsoft case, but rather that they used their dominance in one field (the OS) to gain a significant advantage over a competitor in another field (the browser). If Facebook were to ban the sharing of Google+ links on their network, they might be in similar trouble.

The "stickiness" of Microsoft's products had nothing to do with the anti-trust case, They were leveraging their dominance in one market to exploit another; the permanence of the product has nothing to do with the illegality of their actions.

Isn't that what Google exactly did whilst promoting Google Chrome? Any search for the string "browser" turns up a Chrome ad. Some would argue that this is relatively an anti-competitive stance.

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