Background: eBay uses PayPal as one of the medium of money transaction. Google started with ‘Google Checkout’. Google wants eBay to move to Checkout from PayPal.
- eBay live is set to start in Boston.
- Google announces ‘Let Freedom Ring’ same place same time as eBay live.
- Google clarifies that the reason for Let Freedom Ring to take place at same place and same time is to ‘expose eBay users to power of checkout’
- eBay clarifies ‘ we do not want to use checkout as it is unproven’
- Google insists that ‘let freedom ring’ will continue.
- eBay in an experimental move removes all ‘AdWords’ from eBay US to check for other possibilities.
- Google decides to cancel ‘let freedom ring’
- eBay confirms that ‘experiment’ will continue.
- Google for the first time in history responded ‘No Comments’
- …
Reports : Google send traffic to eBay. accounting for 10.6% of its traffic for Tuesday 6/7/07. From daily clickstream, that percentage dropped to 9.86% for Tuesday 6/12/07, representing a near 7% drop from the previous Tuesday. [source]
Is Google firing back? If they are doing it, is it legal for a search engine to do something like this? Is it first time in history of Google that they have lost to someone? (at least for me, it is first time)
