Comments on: "Multisearch" in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Alpha: Privacy Concerns?

By: ben2talk

ben2talk — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:15:20 +0000

I agree with The Gacko – and to be honest, I tend to do all of my searches from the addressbar using keywords (gi or yi for google/yahoo images, gb for google and bing combined etc).

I’ve been aware of Google’s tendency to be set as default for Firefox and Yahoo for Opera – and the first thing I do with these browsers is to set them up my way.

It is, however, annoying that the default is a custom search page – though no biggie to reset this to a default speed dial page featuring a good selection of search engines.

By: The Gacko

The Gacko — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 23:25:33 +0000

this has been in Ubuntu for a while. although not so much in the Firefox Search box but the default home page has always been a custom google search created by canonical. they use this to generate some revenue (ads through google etc).. same thing that firefox does itself through the search box.

im not sure on what the custom google search tools google gives you but there is bound to be a way for the user/company to see what search terms were being put into the custom search they had setup.

I cant see this as a biggy really

By: Jay Forrest

Jay Forrest — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:36:53 +0000

What we expect is communication and transparency from a Free and Open Source company and project. The issue is not the multisearch, the issue is doing something to our project without asking for letting us know. Ubuntu is suppose to be about community, and Linux is something you do with the community, not to the community. It is that feeling of it not being our distribution that is the problem. Once the community loses the feeling of ownership, the community will go elsewhere.

By: McIvor

McIvor — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:14:39 +0000

I can’t believe how everyone panicked over this. What part of “This is research, it’s not a new feature” didn’t they understand? They explicitly said it wasn’t intended for release. Yeah, they should have mentioned it in the release notes for the alpha, but really, how do we ever expect anything to improve if we won’t let anyone start fixing things?

By: aikiwolfie

aikiwolfie — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 23:36:29 +0000

That’s a bit of a shocking revelation. Canonical better not make too many mistakes like that. People who turn to Linux are generally educated enough to know there are alternatives. Which is how they ended up using Linux anyway.

When market knows there is an alternative you can’t ever afford to violate it’s trust. Otherwise you just might find yourself being made redundant.

By: Simplicius

Simplicius — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 16:11:36 +0000

They were experimenting with a new feature in an *alpha* version. People complained. They removed the feature promptly.

What else do people expect? Sure, they might have done something better, but the outcry was way out of proportion.