Google's Chrome Kills the Lucrative Toolbar Business

(New York Times )With its new Chrome Web browser, Google is not being quite as magnanimous to competitors as it lets on.

The company has insisted that it is not putting the thumb on the scale to favor its own services over those of rivals. And indeed Chrome exhibits better manners than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer often has. When you install it, it lets you pick any search engine you want as the default. And in the unlikely event you have set some other search engine as your favorite in another browser, such as Firefox or Internet Explorer, it will offer to keep that choice in Chrome.

Chrome doesn't even try to become your default browser, at least for now.

But Chrome's sparse interface doesn't allow users to install add-in toolbars. That may not sound like a big deal, but it is. Toolbars represent 12 percent of all search queries, according to comScore.

All the search engines have their own toolbars, of course, and they pay big bucks to computer makers to have them installed on new PCs. Moreover, thousands of other companies have created toolbars with useful, entertaining or deceptive features that also happen to contain search boxes. Look at toolbars from eBay, IAC/InterActiveCorp’s SmileyCentral, and the MySpaceGuardian Toolbar (listed as ''badware'' by Stopbadware.org because it doesn't disclose its features. The search engines pay a hefty commission for traffic sent from these toolbars.