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Mozilla and Google sign a new deal
The Mozilla Foundation has announced
that Google will continue to buy its position as the default Firefox search
engine for the next three years. "The specific terms of this
commercial agreement are subject to traditional confidentiality
requirements, and we're not at liberty to disclose them."
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Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 20, 2011 20:57 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Mozilla being a non-profit foundation doesn't have the mandate to disclose revenue details?
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 20, 2011 21:16 UTC (Tue) by obrakmann (subscriber, #38108) [Link]
mozilla.org is non-profit, mozilla.com isn't.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 20, 2011 21:32 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
You will have to explain that more. LWN's blurb says the foundation has signed the deal and Mozilla corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the foundation anyway.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 20, 2011 21:48 UTC (Tue) by obrakmann (subscriber, #38108) [Link]
I can't :-)
I was just pointing out that there's a difference between the two, implying that they might use that little detail to keep stuff under wraps. If they actually can - under US law, of which I know next to nothing about - I have no idea.
Also, I assume that Jon was wrong to write that the Foundation did the announcement, since 1) the announcement is hosted on the Corporation's site, and 2) Mr. Kovacs, who is the CEO for the Co., is quoted.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 20, 2011 21:44 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] AFAIK, a 501(c)(3) organization has to disclose its tax returns, but it does not have to disclose the name or address of any particular contributor. So I think it could lump the revenue from Google in with all other contributions.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 21, 2011 9:05 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link]
I'd like to think that would be pretty apparent from the balance sheet...
Look for the one which is a gajillion times larger than the others. :D
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 23, 2011 15:01 UTC (Fri) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]
It could be combined in one number on the balance sheet which includes Bing (and maybe others like Yandex, Baidu ?). So won't know exactly what Google payed them.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 21, 2011 22:38 UTC (Wed) by lmartelli (subscriber, #11755) [Link]
But it looks like Google is not a contributor. They signed a deal.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 22, 2011 16:40 UTC (Thu) by gerv (subscriber, #3376) [Link]
Note: I have no inside information on this aspect of the deal, and can therefore speculate freely.
I would strongly suspect that what this means is that, for Google, confidentiality of the agreement terms were a non-negotiable, and Mozilla agreed.
As Mozilla is a US 501(c)3 non-profit, the total amount of revenue will become clear when we eventually file our Form 990 for the appropriate years. However, knowing how much money comes from a deal is very different from knowing how that amount was calculated (i.e. the terms).
Gerv
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 22, 2011 18:58 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
I suspect most people including me are more interested in the revenue rather than the specific terms of the deal. If its going to be published later anyway, why keep it confidential now.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 22, 2011 20:44 UTC (Thu) by gerv (subscriber, #3376) [Link]
Because it's somewhat difficult to publish figures which depend on future events :-)
Gerv
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 23, 2011 11:44 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
So its merely unknown and not confidential. That makes sense.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 23, 2011 14:20 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] FWIW, there are people who claim to know the value of the deal. But they may just be posting random numbers, I sure couldn't say.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 20, 2011 22:03 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Duh. Mozilla deal is just spare change for Google. And Google is interested primarily in the open Web which Mozilla helps to build and support.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 20, 2011 22:17 UTC (Tue) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
Mozilla's placement of Google as the default search engine in Firefox makes a huge difference in Google's continued position as the default search engine people turn to. Google at this point doesn't provide profoundly better search than anyone else; several other search engines exist which have results more or less as good as Google's, or possibly even epsilon better. Google has three things going for their search engine: the inertia of people using what they've gotten used to as long as it remains "good enough", the pile of other services Google offers that integrate very well with each other, and Google's position as the default search engine in most browsers.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 21, 2011 2:26 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Which ones?
There's only Bing, really. And it's nowhere close to Google (it does have some nice feature, though).
There are two local search engines that beat Google in local marketshare - Yandex in the xUSSR and Baidu in China. And that's it.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 21, 2011 2:53 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
I've found DuckDuckGo's quality roughly equivalent to Google: sometimes a bit better, sometimes a bit worse, but roughly on par.
I've had the same experience with Bing that you have: not great, and certainly not good enough to switch (even if I didn't object to doing so for other reasons), but not awful, and if a browser shipped it as a default I suspect many people would live with it.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 21, 2011 4:08 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
It looks like it works fine on simple queries, but not so well for complex ones.
For example, I tried to find "how to make apostillized [note misspelling] documents for a UK company" (I've need it recently). Google gave me a correct answer but DuckDuckGo just returned garbage. Bing returned somewhat relevant results.
Yeah, it's possible to get correct answer from DuckDuckGo, but one has to work for it.
BTW, Yandex also gave me a correct answer for the Russian variant of this query.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 21, 2011 6:36 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
DuckDuckGo gives what look like reasonable results if you use the correctly spelled word; it just didn't catch the misspelling. Like I said, "sometimes a bit better, sometimes a bit worse". I've also hit cases where Google gives complete garbage, usually when I search for a term that has any kind of commercial significance as a product, which leads me to pages of spam. I've also gotten annoyed many times lately by Google changing my search term to a more popular term that it thinks I must want. And yet, for some reason I haven't switched yet, mostly because I've used Google for so long that something feels a little off about DuckDuckGo that I can't put my finger on.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 21, 2011 16:33 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Not really. The correct answer is: http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/about-us/what-we-do/services-we-... - "The only competent authority in the UK to issue apostilles and legalisation certificates" which is on the second page in DDG and Bing.
In Google search it's the first result.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 21, 2011 13:01 UTC (Wed) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link]
"fixing" spelling and trying other forms is what annoys me the most about Google.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 21, 2011 15:31 UTC (Wed) by mlobo (subscriber, #72557) [Link]
You can make Google search for the exact word you typed by surrounding the word in double quotes.
Most people make typos sometimes or spell words wrong for a variety of reasons, so it makes sense that Google tries to do something useful when it is probable that a word has been misspelled.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 21, 2011 16:00 UTC (Wed) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]
There's one more thing: some languages are inflected. With the "spelling" fixing that Google does I don't have to worry about the particular grammatical form of the word(s) I chose as the keywords to search for ;) [I know that what it actually does is not the same thing, but it's effectively very similar.]
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 21, 2011 16:29 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
That's actually one reason why Yandex is so popular in the xUSSR - it understands Russian morphology quite well (sometimes you can get hit by funny gaffes but they are rare).
Google now is reasonably OK, and it's certainly a lot better than it had been 3-4 years before.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 21, 2011 9:14 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link]
It's not really comparable. DDG is not a search engine in Google's sense of the word (while I think they do have a web crawler it is miniscule in comparison). It is more like a frontend which fetches results for you. According to Wikipedia, the main index used seems to be Yahoo. Building a search engine from scratch today would require an operation of a completely different scale.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 21, 2011 9:53 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
Does that difference matter in the least to the people using it? I think my point still applies regardless of how the search engine operates or where it gets its results, as long as it provides sufficiently decent results.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 21, 2011 10:42 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link]
It does not matter if you want to search for stuff on the web, but it matters if you're answering the question "which search engines do we have?". That question is important both economically, where a front end operate under very different conditions, but also politically for discoverability and censorship on the web.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 27, 2011 18:36 UTC (Tue) by dashesy (subscriber, #74652) [Link] Changing the search term did the ultimate trigger for me to switch to DDG, I started using DDG after reading about the deal with Linux Mint here. It started with left-hand-side bar, and the instant search was always driving me crazy specially it changed my searches while I was typing (a long-lasting bug maybe). Recently I had to use ABP to avoid eyeglass magnification popups!When using DDG occasionally I may have to use !g (Google bang in DDG terms) for specific searches but overall it is more than satisfactory. I also found \ very useful (e.g. feeling lucky on lwn)
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 21, 2011 13:06 UTC (Wed) by dark_knight (subscriber, #47846) [Link]
''' There's only Bing, really. And it's nowhere close to Google '''
Oh, no, really, Bing is closer than you expect :)
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 22, 2011 23:10 UTC (Thu) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link]
Haha. It's not about Microsoft using Google specifically, though. They log non-password user input and visited sites. The latter was known already, but I had no idea they collected text entry of unsuspecting users. That's quite a bit more of an invasion of privacy than subtly noting what you are reading: they are also noting what you are searching for and, most likely, what you are writing in general. Unless they only parse submit URIs and derive relations between not only pages but associate pages with words appearing in URIs of the previously visited page.
The Google post is egocentric FUD, but if you read between the lines their concern might be valid. But on the other hand, Microsoft seems to have implemented distributed crawling even better than YaCy ;)
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 21, 2011 1:09 UTC (Wed) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
I'm glad for Mozilla.
Mozilla and Google sign a new deal Posted Dec 23, 2011 3:25 UTC (Fri) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] That's a lot of money. Maybe chump change for Google, but I'm sure the Mozilla Foundation is smiling all the way to the bank.
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