This analogy seems way off to me. It completely misses the fact that Google is doing what it's supposed to do which is giving the user the information they're looking for.
I don't think cutting power is giving the customer (restaurants) or users (not clear in the analogy) what they want.
It's true that with flight search, competitor results are de-emphasized, but as far as I'm concerned Google could even drop them entirely, showing only their internal results if they want to. It's answering the user query, and if the user is unsatisfied they can trivially switch to another source of information.
To make a better analogy, consider that flight search is a specialized version of what Google does more generally. So:
Electric company "EC" wants to start providing DC current to interested customers, so they show the option prominently in their communications with their customers.
This is a tragedy for the existing DC industry because "EC" has the best reputation (highest reliability) in the general electricity industry so most people will first consider them for a DC contract even if they're not necessarily the best for DC power. Still, unhappy customers can easily switch to another DC provider.
> It completely misses the fact that Google is doing what it's supposed to do which is giving the user the information they're looking for.
It used to work that way in the beginning. Now it steers you to whatever the highest bidder wants, whatever their massive opaque ad-revenue-optimizing AI thinks is best, which incidentally seems to be SEO-optimized, pre-digested and ad-laden portals into a whole other ecosystem of in-your-face click farms and garbage results stabbing you in the eyeballs.
Were you not aware of the massive conflict of interest that a search engine with ads represents...from the very beginning?
I don't think cutting power is giving the customer (restaurants) or users (not clear in the analogy) what they want.
It's true that with flight search, competitor results are de-emphasized, but as far as I'm concerned Google could even drop them entirely, showing only their internal results if they want to. It's answering the user query, and if the user is unsatisfied they can trivially switch to another source of information.
To make a better analogy, consider that flight search is a specialized version of what Google does more generally. So:
Electric company "EC" wants to start providing DC current to interested customers, so they show the option prominently in their communications with their customers.
This is a tragedy for the existing DC industry because "EC" has the best reputation (highest reliability) in the general electricity industry so most people will first consider them for a DC contract even if they're not necessarily the best for DC power. Still, unhappy customers can easily switch to another DC provider.