Ubuntu switches back to Google as default search engine
lists.ubuntu.com
lists.ubuntu.com
I don't think it's an accident that this announcement comes far away enough from the next release for there to be time for Google to make them a better offer. Even if that doesn't happen in the next release, this may be Canonical's way of showing their hand.
Also, isn't Bing powering Yahoo's search these days anyway?
Via: http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/01/21/firefox-3-6-release/
Ubuntu is claiming 12 million users. That's not incredibly big, but it's probably enough to make Google take notice.
don't think just yet.
I love flickr, but Yahoo Search needs to die.
On several of my sites, it routinely requests URLs that are 1) blocked in robots.txt and 2) have been 404 for years
I would love to see Firefox and Safari change their default search to Bing (I would still use Google). Who knows, Google might start getting serious about things like privacy.
FFS, Google was the ONLY search engine which went to court to protect your searches from collection under COPA: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-146420.html
Microsoft, Yahoo etc just handed their logs over.
Gmail's still the only webmail provider which uses SSL by default.
There are numerous similar cases.
Microsoft can't use "Privacy" to market against Google because they do less to protect your privacy that Google do.
(They could argue "we are less competent than Google are at doing things with the information we also collect, so you are less likely to get freaked out when our services appear to read your mind". However, I'm unconvinced that lack-of-competence is a winning marketing strategy. But hey.. it seems to be working for Sarah Palin, so what do I know...)
If providing tools to manage privacy gave MS an advantage, I could imagine there's at least a possibility they might supply them.
As another statistically irrelevant point, my mom who believes doing anything on the computer is "downloading" has started using Bing.
The announcement omits the part that Google is paying them for the spot on default search.
"I am pursuing this change because Canonical has negotiated a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo! and this revenue will help Canonical to provide developers and resources to continue the open development of Ubuntu and the Ubuntu Platform."
DuckDuckGo is one of them--it doesn't need sock puppets.
I myself appreciate this "advertisement" and will give it a try, but if the search sucks, it's easy enough to switch back.
This was a business decision by Canonical. I too would have liked to have seen an explanation as to why the change was made but at the end of the day, it's the code and not the organisation that's open source.