I imagine it kind of like this...

Two stores, A and B are competitors. I visit company A and say that I'll stand at the entrance of their competitor, store B. I'll tell each customer trying to enter store B about store A and attempt to refer them, as long as store A pays me $0.50 for each person I try to send their way.

This works, some people that drove to visit store B now go to store A instead. Now, store B is getting annoyed at me "stealing" their customers, but I have a solution. I tell store B the more money they pay me, the less likely it is that I'll refer their next customer to store A. So, store B starts paying me $1.00 each time someone tries to enter their own store, and in return, I do nothing but stand there.

A year goes by and I'm standing at the entrance of every store in the country. I collect a dollar when someone tries to enter every store, and I do nothing but let them pass.

That's naive way of looking at things. Do you know how many brands and trademarks exist in the world? It's over 40 million! Do you know how many brands easily gets mixed up with normal English? When someone searches for best buy, do they always want to go to best buy store? When I type subway, do I want a sandwich shop or subway station? Doing things at scale is very different. And you can't be unfair to small brands while only taking care of big brands. While I understand your issue, there is no clear cut solution here.

To be fair, they don’t do that on Google Maps. However they will push their own Google Flights service when searching for United. Eg “Book United” redirection to Google Flight.

Why does Google owe you traffic?

If I promise to give you a truthful answer to a question you ask, "What's 2+2?", and then I say, "5" (because math teachers pay me to give that answer), the same argument could be made.

Why do I owe you a fulfilled promise? Because I said I'd be honest? Why do I owe you honesty about my honesty?

Reductio ad absurdum

If I build a search engine and promise that it will give accurate and honest results to your search queries, and then it doesn't do that... why do I owe you? "I didn't force you to trust me" is the most childish way to try and weasel out of broken promises there is.

To answer your question though - they don't, but it makes them a shitty company to lie to/manipulate their users.

It's lying insofar as grocery stores having two brands of chips on an endcap that you see first before you get to the actual aisle with the other 30 brands is lying.

More like specifically asking a clerk where the Lays Salt & Vinegar chips, and they walk you to the chip aisle and respond with "Here are the Doritos", but sure...

Except this store only makes money on showing you where the chips are and not on the sales so if they can't show you the Doritos first, there's no store and no chips of any kind. If that's what you'd prefer, then pretend the store doesn't exist and go to a different one.

That's not the only way they make money though. Even if it was the only way they make money, giving accurate results in those cases is the cost of keeping your users for cases you can serve them ads that are relevant. The only reason they got big was their accurate results so it is a shitty thing to do.

Google owes mostly-unbiased accuracy to the internet at large. They built their brand and reputation on that. It should not be possible to purchase a shortcut on the accuracy, especially someone else's.

It doesn't owe anyone anything. It trades this unbiased accuracy for eyeballs on its advertising, the same advertising that many folks in this comment section are condemning. Without the advertising, Google doesn't owe anyone anything. It's not a charity.

Its a sad world you live in where businesses don't owe you to behave ethically.

You'll probably figure out at some point that they do, and that this whole law thing is a proxy for ethics we put in place so that we can punish people that don't.

Until then, live in your world.

I live in the same world you do, minus that smug sense of entitlement to products and services others provide.

Google shouldn’t be a purveyor of brand quality in the case where the user has made an explicit request. If a user types in “shoes” should they 100% get shoes.com as the first result? Of course not. But Expedia? It feels wrong not to make that the first result.

Expedia is indeed the first result for "Expedia", after the 0-2 slots of advertising that may or may not be Expedia. If Google can't monetize the search results page, why are they obligated to provide the search results in the first place? Until Google recoups the costs by showing ads, the relationship between Expedia and Google is one sided: Google provides a lot of traffic to Expedia with nothing in return. How is that fair?

It doesn't. And I totally understand from a business point of view why they do what they do. This is an unfortunate side effect of the monopoly they have on web search, which due to network effects and aggregation is unlikely to go away.

The only real solution is to regulate this to make competition fairer again.