There’s been a lot of noise recently in the Ubuntu community about the announcement that Canonical is planning to switch the default search engine and home page in Firefox to Yahoo! Search. People are tweeting about it, podcasting about it, and generally getting worked up. Some think that it’s the end of the world (or an MS takeover of Canonical), some could care less.
Personally, I think it’s a good move. It’s actually kind of refreshing to see results from a different search engine now and then. Besides, it only takes two clicks to get you back to using Google. This is where things get interesting. You see, if you chose Google as your search engine in the search bar at the top of Firefox, you also will get a new default home page … featuring Google. A closer look seems to show that Canonical has not abandoned their partnership with Google at all and still sends a partner ID along with your search results.
Is Canonical partnering with any search engine that’s willing to pay, and selling the default to the highest bidder? I sure hope so! It makes great business sense. Bring on Bing! If it makes Canonical cash that they can use to fund Linux development, I’m all for them taking MS money too. As long as they give you a choice, people will have their favorite search engine, and Canonical makes money – win win.
Here’s screenshots of the new Firefox home page and search fields showing the partner IDs.
Yahoo! Search, the default:
Google, the default after 2 clicks:
What do you think about these search engine changes? Leave your comments below!
It really makes little difference. Linux users are the kind of people who know how to change their default search engine.
“…and Canonical makes money.”
Canonical makes money only for searches that will be done using Yahoo search engine. If all of the users switch there will be no money for Canonical.
“As long as they give you a choice…”
That is one single most important idea in Linux.
So if people (just like me) are switching to Google Canonical will not make any money at all. I think Canonical doesn’t understand that majority of Ubuntu-users dislike Microsoft and anything proved to be in same ecosystem.
I don’t know what Linux Mint is doing but if they gonna stay with Google i more than ever will recommend newbies to try Linux Mint than Ubuntu. Personally i have lot of chance to try several other distros.
If you read closer… “A closer look seems to show that Canonical has not abandoned their partnership with Google at all and still sends a partner ID along with your search results.” it would appear they may make money either way, provided their partnership with Google involves click through revenue.
What about Mozilla’s deal with Google?
Mozilla did the heavy lifting, they should get the search cash.
What kind of font setup are you using on those images? They look better than current Karmic default Sans 10 with supixel hinting. Will have Lucid different fontconfig?
I made no changes to the fonts. It’s a default Lucid install in VirtualBox.
They can also make it country specific.Yandex for Russia for example.Google is not on every countries number one search engine list