Microsoft to provide default Ubuntu search?
Author: Paul Tansom
A while back I noted from Popey’s blog that Canonical are changing the default search engine in the next version of Ubuntu to Yahoo!. I don’t think I’ve been particularly impressed with the Yahoo! search since the 90′s sometime, when I switched to Google because it provided much easier access to the search results I wanted. This was largely because it was at that time unencumbered by advertising results being engineered into high listing placements. Sadly that isn’t the case today, and I have the same annoyance with Google providing endless ‘search noise’ in the form of links to price comparison sites, or links into a site search for the terms you’ve used on Google, generally with results that are totally irrelevant. That is beside the point for this post though.
I note from recent news that Microsoft and Yahoo! have been given the go ahead for their search deal, which means that Microsoft Bing should be providing the search results for Yahoo! by the end of the year.
Interesting times, since that would appear to indicate that the average new user of Ubuntu will be using a Microsoft search engine, and one that may not be as good for searching for information on Linux and Open Source software – although it has to be said I’ve not experimented with this myself.
