US dismisses Google complaint, says IE 7 plays fair

US government regulators on Friday dismissed claims that Microsoft’s newest browser, Internet Explorer 7, gives the company’s own search engine an unfair advantage, knocking aside objections that Google recently raised.

The Justice Department has evaluated the search box - a new feature in IE 7 that lets users initiate searches - and concluded it "respects users’ choices" and "is easily changed," according to a status report released Friday by federal and state officials.

Earlier this month Google complained that IE 7, which will ship later this year for Windows XP and within Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows Vista, in January 2007, wasn’t letting users pick a default search engine when it was installed.

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