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.