There is a lot more to this and The New York Times articles mentions it.
Google will turn it off when asked and evidently did so for Amazon and a couple others. However, if some asks for it to be turned off, they may not be able to get it back later if they change their mind. Google also might make some changes in this whole thing if they get a lot of complaints.
Quote:
“Some of our retail clients have pretty horrible site search,” he said. “So for them, this will be a benefit. For our larger clients, we’ll probably ask Google to turn this off.”
That is the route that Amazon has apparently chosen. The retailer declined to comment for this article, but last week Google’s search-within-search function did not appear when users entered “amazon.com” into the initial search box.
According to a Google spokeswoman, the company has honored such requests from “a couple” of unnamed businesses. These companies, however, may not be able to reverse their decisions.
“So we ask them to try it out and see if they want it removed,” the spokeswoman said. “We think it could be a really useful feature.”
She added that the feature was currently available for an undisclosed, but relatively small, number of sites, and appeared when Google detected a high probability that a user wanted more refined search results within a specific site. While Google has not received much negative feedback on the service, she said, the company could change it in the future.
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