According to a number of articles like this one, Google is the source of an antitrust complaint against Windows Vista because of a change of the default implementation of Desktop file search. In Windows XP, when you searched for files it would do a actual, go scan your harddrive search, and at the end of the search you got an option to turn on indexing to make your search faster. This would search and make notes about your harddrive in advance so that the requested search became much faster. I’m guessing that it was off by default in XP because it wasn’t really optimized for a desktop both in performance, the type of data it indexed about the files and it wasn’t something people did a whole lot so it wasn’t worth the weight on the system. Enter Vista and the world has changed, indexing is the standard approach to search on the desktop as demonstrated by the improved indexers shipped in MacOSX, Google desktop and MSN one. So the good old xp indexer gets a lot of attention, a nice upgrade, some very nice usability improvements and, Oh yeah, the indexer is now on by the default instead of just for power users. Well, that last step is one step too far according to Google.

According to the article they are worried about interactions between their indexer and the vista one. While a lot of people, on digg at least, are calling BS. It is especially weird to me since a number of applications that I’m running these days are busy indexing the harddrive. The photo gallery software and all three music applications are going at it. They manage to coexist in vista, what’s wrong with Google’s indexer? This sounds like a technical limitation in their product they wish to use to harm vista’s indexer.

They have plenty of business reasons for such a desire, they used XP’s deficiencies in this area as a big reason to get people use the Google toolbar (which includes their desktop indexer). This is important to them because it has all sorts of tie backs to Google services where they make money. It was a good gig, the MSN team developed and did the same thing. The Vista indexer doesn’t have any such ties, but now people have lost a huge reason to install the Google toolbar (and the MSN toolbar for that matter). So they have a business problem, and from their complaint a minor technical problem. Business model problems don’t make good complaints to the DOJ, but maybe they could make hay with their technical issue. Unfortunately most techies would predictably call BS if they heard the complaint (I guess that’s why it was a confidential complaint) which leads back to the premise, It appears that Google has unabashedly decided to be evil.

On the other hand, indexers are programs that are not just running all the time, but constantly trying to do work. Smart applications attempt to do more and more stuff when the user wouldn’t notice, such as checking for and downloading updates or pre-creating image thumbnails so they don’t have to be generated at run time. On a logical level there is some theoretical maximum to how much time a computer has for such background tasks. Google seems to be implying that there is not enough room for anyone but them. Even in this worse case, this is something that a years worth of Moore’s law will fix faster then any legal remedy. Oh and I should point out it has been years since the first of this generation of indexers were downloaded and used on computers.

It’s going to be interesting to see the arguments on the other side of this one.

Disclosure: I work in windows networking, I don’t have anything to do with the indexer technologies except complain about how slow the early versions of it in pre-reset longhorn were.