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At the moment Live Search is used far too infrequently for Mozilla to make this change. However, I'm sure if they were to win market share then it would be added to the Firefox browser.
8 commentsFriday, June 6, 2008
Danny Sullivan Wants Search Choice In Firefox
Give up the Google default, search maven says
The relationship between Google and Mozilla keeps the Firefox maker well-funded, but apparently relegates the option for Microsoft's Live Search to one step away for consumers.
It's easy enough to add Live Search, Wikipedia, Merriam-Webster, or any other search site to the Firefox browser; we needed only a few moments at Firefox's search add-on site to do so.. As it has done for some time, the Mozilla Foundation makes Google the default search provider.
One would be hard-pressed to quibble with that choice, given Google's skill at gleaning relevance from a few scant terms per query. Search industry maven Danny Sullivan found reason to quibble anyway, exhorting Mozilla to clear out the search defaults.
Sullivan said at Search Engine Land the pending arrival of Firefox 3.0 should be accompanied by the same kind of open search choice in the browser that Google demanded of Microsoft and Internet Explorer.
"Microsoft is a good search engine that searchers should have access to directly from that search bar. By not offering it, Firefox is failing its users out of either financial reasons or spite," said Sullivan.
Even if Mozilla cleared out the search defaults, and made Live Search available alongside Google, Yahoo, and other search options, we're not convinced anything but Google would earn the choice as the default search for most consumers. Google is a verb and a globally-known brand associated with search, two qualities Live Search may not be able to overcome.
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best for users
Because we're not a convicted monopolist with a business conflict of interest like Microsoft, I don't believe the same standards should apply, as Danny seems to.
Microsoft, if it was doing the best thing for its users, would put Google in as the default. But they're leveraging IE to push their last-place search engine and they really wanted to put it in as the default.
As a result of Google's justifiable concerns around Microsoft abusing its monopoly to uplift a weaker product and the public outcry that resulted when Google pushed that to the headlines, Microsoft compromised and offered new users the choice of default.
Mozilla isn't in the compromised position that Microsoft is, so we can just do the right thing for users which is to set Google as the default search service for most of our new Firefox users. (Some will get other services if they are in a locale that varies significantly.)
Danny wants to gin up some controvery claiming that this is all about the money. It's simply not. Google is the default search engine for most of Mozilla's users because Google is the best choice for most of our users. We include Yahoo in the list as the second search engine because it is the most beneficial second choice for most of our users. Live Search from Microsoft is not even a contender -- garnering only 5th place in popularity among those seeking out an additional search choice for Firefox.