Smarter Geek

   Asa Dotzler one of Firefox’s (Mozilla) co-founders has recently did a blog post that recommends that all Mozilla’s users should

“switch Firefox’s search from Google to Bing”

due to the privacy issues with Google.

No…  Really, really!!!!

I have to admit that this is just about as believable as Bill Gates praising Apple Computers or Microsoft saving Apple from Bankruptcy. Asa makes some good points however on his Blog that Google and it certainly seems to be getting complacent with data private after the video of Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO said

"If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

I think the reason that Bing’s privacy policy is better than Google’s is that they have already been through the anti-trust ringer and don’t want a repeat of history. Where as Google still thinks it can do know wrong and are willing to push the boundaries a little further.

I also have to wounder weather this means that Microsoft are also paying Mozilla just like “Google (and Yahoo and others) pay for search traffic”. This would be very interesting if this was the case as it would mean Microsoft would effective be paying IE’s biggest competitor. While this sound unlikely just remember that the Exchange team licences Active Sync to both the iPhone and Android even thought they compete against Windows Mobile so I think it is definitely possible. 

You can read Asa’s Blogs articles below:

• if you have nothing to hide…
• follow-up on schmidt
• privacy context and other concerns

Microsoft new search engine Bing has been making some very interesting in roads into the the search market over the past few months with over 10% of the North American market share. What is interesting is that when ever Bing has in increase in market share it is always at the expense of Google and not Yahoo. This show that Yahoo’s users are very loyal and are not easily swayed which might away from their preferred search engine. Which seem to make the deal they made with Yahoo even more sense as it would have taken a lot of work to get the Yahoo user to change teams. Google users seems to be not so loyal to the brand and are willing to try a new search engine which could work to Microsoft advantage. Either way just with the browser wars it will be interesting to see if many people change their default browser search engine back to Google when Windows 7 is released to the market in the next few months.

Figured 1. Google = Red, Yahoo = Yellow, Bing = Blue.

Graph has been modified. See original at http://bit.ly/12m6ls