Bada-Bing! Mozilla flips Firefox to YAHOO! for search Mozilla will make Yahoo! the default search engine for Firefox in the US, ending its decade-long pact with Google. The new deal affects the open-source browser on the desktop and on mobile devices. Lest we forget, Yahoo! Search is powered by ... Microsoft Bing. Terms of the new search deal were not disclosed, but the …
"You know, they might have improved it since 1998."
They got worse. Now they use Bing.
I see a rash of sysadmin suicides about to occur. Bleary-eyed sysadmins hauled out of bed at "why is this even a time that exists" in the morning will be asked to work on some server for which only RDP is working. Desperate to get a patch, they'll immediately open IE to download Firefox. After swatting away a dozen irritating things trying to convince you to use IE, realizing they have to change some irritating setting before they can download and run the Firefox installer and then getting to run they'll finally launch a proper browser.
They get hte browser open, punch in the error code only to realize that the search has gone through Bing, and Bing can't find anything on Microsoft's own web properties worth a damn. Despairing at the futility of life, they will kill themselves with a shredded Mighty Mouse, because it seems more logical cramming Microsoft's craptastrophe upon people who quite clearly were trying to get away from the insanity in the first place.
Moral of the story: friends don't let friends Bing. And only enemies for life make Bing the default on anything.
Amazed how many downvotes my comment attracted. Guess there is still a lot of Yahoo/Bing hate.
I used Bing sometimes when a google search gets too much spam or crappy links on the first couple pages, and sometimes it provides much better results. Probably because the link spammers that are always battling with Google pay less attention to trying to game Bing's results.
Pretty sure for simple searches like "indian restaurant london" you get similar quality results. I just tried it and found similar quality results on Google, Yahoo! and Bing (since Yahoo! uses Bing) Actually, I like Bing's presentation of the results best out of the three.
"Amazed how many downvotes my comment attracted. Guess there is still a lot of Yahoo/Bing hate.
Not really so much hate, but experience, at last where yahoo is concerned. It may well have improved since 1998, and it may not even make a pigs breakfast of searches for a curry house any more, but that front page of theirs is a catastrophe no one on their right mind would go near voluntarily. And you don't forget or forgive the "22 pages of porn irrespective of search terms" experience circa 1998 in a hurry.
Bing I haven't, and won't try, so I don't know how bad or good it is and I couldn't really care less either. MS have had a couple of other pops at search before Bing, the last I recall being Live.com, circa 2003 ish. Much bullish fanfare preceded it about beating google etc, so I tried it using IE. Amazingly, on an absurdly simply page with only 5 or six elements (basically a blue curve, a search box and a submit button, on their own browser, all of the elements appeared to assemble in entirely random order. Every time it loaded. I thought it was a joke, or spoof, or a mistype on my part, or the page had been hijacked etc etc, because I just couldn't believe the worlds largest company could seriously try to punt something that would embarrass an inebriated chimp let loose on Dreamweaver. And that was before even trying the search, which didn't improve things. So MS don't ever get to take the fucking Michael again, because even 60 seconds is far too long to waste on them.
So DuckDuckGo for most things, google for the rest till something better with no connection to MS or Yahoo comes along.
After the latest update last week to 33.1.1, Firefox made a strong mention of their users privacy and of the availability to use DuckDuckGo as your preferred search engine. DuckDuck was leading the search Engine chart by quite a margin on the search engine options page as well, although not quite as much this week.
Interesting that Yahoo will now notice your Do Not Track settings, almost like they are saying we'll let you search in peach and quiet, if you pay us, although the payment comes from those people who have not switched on their Do Not Track settings.
"Interesting that Yahoo will now notice your Do Not Track settings, almost like they are saying we'll let you search in peace and quiet"
I think you've got a very strange idea about "Do Not Track", you're going to get bombarded with exactly the same number of ads, all the time. It's just that in general they'll be about stuff you have absolutely no interest in.
Sometimes I wonder whether I'm the only person in the world who has on occasion found targeted advertising to be helpful.
> Sometimes I wonder whether I'm the only person in the world who has on
> occasion found targeted advertising to be helpful.
Yes, you are <G>.
Seriously, though; I find I am *less* likely to buy things from the level of targeted advertising I have seen. There is no subtlety to it, and they like to make not to miss ANY chance to push the same product you did a related search on with EVERY page you visit. It's why I've never bought that DVD of some remastered version of "Metropolis"; for weeks (or even months) after I was looking up information on the film, I was seeing ads EVERYWHERE for the same DVD release of it. And this wasn't on film or entertainment-related sites (where there might be some vague chance of seeing the ad), but pretty much ANYPLACE that has AdSense(less). Pissed me off so much I resolved to never buy the disk, unless it happened to end up in a one-dollar closeout bin someplace. The same has happened to a number of other products, which I have ALSO resolved to never buy.
You want to advertise to me? Fine, do it the same way advertisers have bought ad space on network television for decades: figure out sites likely to have your target audience. But targeting me directly constitutes harrasment, and my restraining orders come with names like "Privacy Badger", etc.
Mozilla fired Brendan Eich for being targetted by the gay lobby, and there was something of a campaign against them as a result. Perhaps it worked? Or perhaps now they are going crazy without his technical leadership? (Okay, they didn't fire him, they made him walk the plank, but either way he got fed to the sharks.)
The Firefox default homepage always looks the same no matter what your search provider - a big Firefox icon, a search box underneath, and a small amount of promotional text beneath that.
I hope Mozilla have demanded an upfront payment by the way, will Yahoo be around in five years time?
"it's possible that the talks broke down over the Firefox-maker's stance toward the Do Not Track browser privacy standard."
Typical Google, trying to force their will on everyone and too hell with the general public's privacy and choices.
Mind you, this is a win-win situation: If Mozilla and Firefox thrive in this new situation, it helps prove to the world that you don't have to kowtow to the Googleborg, and if they end up struggling financially and either go back or go out of business, it proves that Google have the power to pretty much dictate what goes on the web, and thus should be treated as an anticompetitive monopoly.
Interesting take in the article. Google's Chrome has an option for "do not track", they also have an extension button for "do not track". Google's ad system respects the "do not track" setting.
Yahoo didn't respect it at all. Yet the author believes that the negotiation for the browser search engine was based upon this, and therefore Yahoo won the deal?
Makes no sense!
> As part of its deal with Mozilla, however, [Yahoo!] says it will now recognize Do Not Track again but only for Firefox users.
Okay, when you need a “burner” email account [1] - choose Yahoo using Firefox and that should be marginally safer.
[1] http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2014/11/14/Being-Secret
Part of me doesn't much care, I can change the default search to whatever I feel like, and I intend to. Although I have noticed somewhat a swing in the web market.
Originally I used IE because well, only real option. Then I moved to firefox which was worlds better. Started getting lots of problems with firefox, pages crashing, running slow etc, and I switched to chrome. Now many years later, chrome isn't displaying pages correctly, keeps crashing on me and have plugin issues for me, and I'm considering going back to firefox.
I have decided to make duckduckgo both my homepage and default search engine in FF and Chrome to see how it goes. I know that many here have been fans for a while, and it was El Reg who introduced me to it a couple of years ago. Now that Google seems intent on becoming the N$A, I figured it can't hurt to try an alternative. I'm glad I'm not in the States though, because I'd hate to lumped with Yahoo! as my default, as a matter of principle, no matter how trivially easy changing it is (Penguin icon since it's an aquatic bird)
Why didn't Mozilla partner up with DuckDuckGo or Startpage or some other anonymous search engine proxy since they claim to care so much.... Yahoo is just a cesspool of ads, Google is 90% dominant, Bing is M$ etc... So it should have been easy an easy choice i.e. none of the big three...
"Why didn't Mozilla partner up with DuckDuckGo or Startpage or some other anonymous search engine proxy since they claim to care so much.... Yahoo is just a cesspool of ads, Google is 90% dominant, Bing is M$ etc... So it should have been easy an easy choice i.e. none of the big three..."
I doubt DDG has anywhere near enough money to pay Mozilla at the rate that Google/Binghoo does.
Sure. But they could if they were the default search engine of choice on Firefox.... Mozilla is changing the way it funds itself and looking for other options. That became clear when it started leaning towards Blank Tabs w/ Ads. So they could hook their trailer up to one of the new privacy proxies and go for it big time....
MY search engine of choice is ask.com; but, I've been using it since it was Ask Jeeves. Yahoo is getting to the point that I just don't like it as much as I once did. With the many problems that Yahoo continues having with Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Groups, I just wonder how problematic Yahoo Search would be.
None of you care because you can change YOUR default search provider and obviously, it's all about YOU YOU YOU and only YOU, right?
I use Firefox and I'm concerned. Seems to me that the second Chrome shows a higher market share than FF, Google stop supporting what is probably the single most widely known F/OSS project in existence.
I'd like to see MS and Apple pick up that particular tab as an obligation-free donation. Firefox and Mozilla gave us the open web and prevented web standards from being a bad joke. Chrome and its horrible -webkit extensions are bringing us rapidly back to the days of IE6.
Everyone benefits from Mozilla. I hope Google lose an extremely significant percentage of search traffic for dumping them.
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