[tor-talk] Google as default search engine revisited

[Joe Btfsplk]

On 1/13/2012 7:45 PM, Andrew Lewman wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Jan 2012 20:50:01 +0200
> Maxim Kammerer<mk at dee.su>  wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 19:25, Andrew Lewman<andrew at torproject.org>
>> wrote:
>>> Also, the majority of users want google as their default engine due
>>> to the quality of search results.
It might be a stretch that the "majority" of [TBB] users want google.  I 
don't really care what search engine others use - whatever they want.  
I've not found a huge difference in quality of search results from 
engines like Ixquick vs google.  Maybe it depends on WHAT your searching 
for.  Many don't know if other search engines are suitable, because 
they've never tried them.  Folks use google or bing for exact same 
reason vast majority of people use Windows - because that's mostly the 
only OS that non Apple mfgs put on machines, not because Windows is 
inherently better than other OSs.  McDonalds is the largest restaurant 
chain in the world, but not because they have better food than any other.

An earlier comment, "because it's the default engine in Firefox" holds 
no water, if Tor Project gets no funding from leaving it the default 
engine.  Many users (even for TBB) will just use default settings & 
default search engine.  Maybe other easier to use (no "captchas"), more 
privacy conscious engines could be made the default but still include 
google in the list.  If Tor users that want google can't figure out how 
to select it from a list...