I guess it's becoming fashionable to think of Google as the new Microsoft.
How is my question consistent with things people have said about Microsoft? It's not when they bought it, it's how they reacted to Gabriel contacting them about it.
It's that somehow Google is using unfair advantages to beat their competition.
And the timing of it definitely matters. It shows their decision to acquire the domain was not influenced by competition.
As for how they reacted to Gabriel, I'm not sure what their specific reaction was but I probably wouldn't give up a 1-word, 4-letter domain regardless of the state of the competition. The fact that the competition decided to name their company something I own would be unfortunate for them. Too bad. So sad. SOL.
My god, I never said they acquired the domain because of the then-nonexistent DuckDuckGo nor did I suggest they give it up to them. All I'm saying is the domain was sitting there idle, Gabriel asked them for it, and they told him no and made it point to their own search page instead. They had every right to say no but it seems like a conscious act of meanness on their part to suddenly make it point to themselves when their competitor asked to buy it. It's kind of like adding insult to injury (rather denial).
Why are you so aggressively set on defending Google when I'm not really even attacking them?
"Does it seem to violate their "Don't be evil" mantra to anybody else? This was clearly a conscious decision to confuse people."
With your statement, you're implying malicious intent. I'm stating that I don't see it together with substance to back up my statement. That's not "aggressively set on defending Google." That's simply trying to clearly make an argument.
Of they just didn't realize they had such a cool domain until Gabriel contacted them. Google is a big company and it's entirely possible for things to fall between the cracks in an organization of that size.
please, for the love of god, stop with the "google is evil" crap. every single post about google, there's at least a couple comments saying google is violating their don't be evil principle. it's really fucking annoying. can't you find a criticism that's at least a little bit more original?
You shouldn't dismiss my question just because it reminds you of things others have said. I'm not those other people, I have no idea what you've read. I'm sorry my question isn't "original" enough for you. Google is a huge tech company and anyone who reads tech news hears a good amount of criticism about them. You don't find it weird that they changed duck.com to point to their domain when DuckDuckGo's founder inquired about it? It seems more likely that you didn't even think about it because I brought up their slogan.
I have read here comments along the lines of "Anyone doing that would be evil, but here it's Google. So it's OK. Google would never do any harm" (it was a post about privacy)
The "Google is evil" trend may be an overreaction to those comments, but it embodies a sane criticism in my opinion. It gives a counterpart to the awkward "Google is my big brother"
tl;dr no reason (IMHO) it should point to Google search -- it's just confusing people.