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Comment by crumblan | Hacker News Reader

For anyone thinking of trying Mint; they will install customized search engines in your Firefox and Chromium, it is a shit experience, and it is irritating to remove or avoid.

I would suggest you do not use Mint if you plan on doing any internet searching.

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This is a little ridiculous: you can trivially add the DuckDuckGo (or Google) search provider; e.g. on the right-hand side of the DDG search page[1] there is a "Add to Firefox" (and presumably similarly for Chromium) link that you can just click, and it just works.

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=add+a+search+engine

I know, but I wanted Google, and I found it difficult to remove the branded search and switch to basic Google. It's not a ridiculous complaint, I just think if they are willing to treat their users like that it will only get worse in the future. I jumped off of Ubuntu because of Unity, though, so I might be feeling very "once bitten..."

That is quite understandable, but think of it from a scrupulous person's perspective. You could make your default search Google, in which case you're sending your user a mixed message: "I am giving you the popular search" versus "I don't actually care about your privacy."

What's worse is, it's generally a conflict of interest. At least at one point (and perhaps it's still the case) Google was paying Mozilla for the privilege of being the default search provided on Firefox. Don't get me wrong, I like money going towards Mozilla; but I'd prefer that Mozilla not have to sell Firefox users' privacy for it.

Google Search is still a bit better than DDG at very recent news, at exposing cached pages, and at calculating natural language expressions. Sometimes they are better on relevance but for most searches DDG does very well. In some sense the freshness of Google Search is its only real remaining advantage in the marketplace: the Internet Archive has long been better for long-term caching, and Wolfram Alpha now does a much better job with some natural language queries.

("Some" because astonishingly, Wolfram Alpha does not have a syntax of composition. What I mean is, you can just ask Wolfram Alpha "Schwarzschild radius of the Sun" and it will answer that if the Sun got beneath 6 km wide, it would collapse into a black hole. But don't try to append the words "in light-seconds" or "/ speed of light" to that query, don't even wrap it in parentheses, because Wolfram Alpha will suddenly look at you and say, "WTF does any of that mean?!?!?")

Selling the default search position to Google is just about Mozilla's entire cash flow. It amounts to several hundred million a year.

I bypass the search box. By adding a keyword search (inspired by Opera,) to my browser (Firefox.) Then when I want to search, I hit CTRL + L and then type something like 'dd search term' for say duck duck, then hit return. I can set up multiple keyword searches - which I find personally more flexible.

You loose suggest which is slightly annoying, but I can live with that.

Really? Is there no way around that? Ie just change your browser search settings? I was looking to try out mint, cuz Ubuntu is leaving something to be desired these days.

It's just a simple package that's installed with Firefox. The parent is just making it seem like a huge deal, but it's trivial to remove the package and/or change your default search provider.

I did not find it trivial to remove the package, and changing my default provider didn't work for whatever reason.

Sounds annoying. Did you try through the firefox (registry) - about:config? Failing that you could try something like Firefox Nightly.

I eventually got it, but I did end up doing the registry and mucking out some bits in /etc. Then I figured, "hey, I haven't tried Debian yet." So that's probably my next step... but it's looking like if you want it done right you're going to have to compile it yourself :/

I tried Mint for the same reason, and this search default really soured me on it. I didn't find it easy to remove, either. Just wanted to warn others.

I found it about ten times easier than changing the default search in IE. Clicking the Search engine icon in FF and then clicking "Get More Search Engines" takes you to: http://www.linuxmint.com/searchengines.php#siteinfo-legal

From there you just have to click the icon of the one you want. They should put them at the top of that page and not the bottom though (I added the anchor to the bottom of the page).

Fair enough, but I had an edge case where I wanted to use Pentadactyl, and it kept using the branded search as default no matter how I tried to tweak the settings. I eventually got rid of it, but it was infuriating for me that there was no simple way to hit, "I don't want this," and have it removed totally.

Linux Mint user here: This was never a big issue for me. They explain it thoroughly at http://www.linuxmint.com/searchengines.php and let you click through to install Google (plain vanilla, non-custom Google) very easily. Plus, so far this only affects Firefox, their default browser. If you use Chrom[e|ium] like I do, it's even less of an issue.

I really think the parent comment is an overreaction.

Did they install it after you installed your browser? If they did then that sucks. Otherwise it's not that bad. Probably a source of funding for the project.

It's just with the default browser and yes, it's a main source of funding. This is what they say about it:

  Search engines help fund Linux Mint: Search engines share with Linux Mint the revenue generated for them by Linux Mint users. The following search engines share revenue with us: Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo and Amazon. By using these engines for search or to make purchases, you help fund the Linux Mint project.

  Easy installation of other engines: Clear explanations and easy instructions are there in Linux Mint for users to understand why some engines aren't installed by default and how to easily install them.

from: http://linuxmint.com/rel_maya_whatsnew.php

e: Clarification

It is a source of funding, which would be fine with me, but it was also basically unusable, and it would give me weird results that I didn't get on regular Google. I also had a bit of trouble removing it. So bad experience for me overall.

Edit: no, they weren't so sinister as to install it with another package, it's part of the Firefox extensions in the default install.

Since Linux Mint 12 this is not the case anymore. They listened to their users, and removed the Google Custom Search.

As a convenience to its users, Linux Mint has a dedicated webpage where you can easily add search easily with one click: http://www.linuxmint.com/searchengines.php You can of course add search engines in any other Firefox supported way also.

Brilliant, I'll have to look at it again.

And you don't have any problem with IE being packed with Bing search out of the box ?

I use neither Windows nor IE, but I am assuming it's set as a preference and not installed as an extension.

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