Submitted by The ripples caused by Google’s Eric Schmidt’s words are spreading further and further throughout the internet. Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s director of community development, wrote on his blog, urging people to switch away from Google to Bing, which he claims has a better privacy policy. Dotzler points users to the Firefox Bing add-on.
We’ve all read the words from the Google CEO, but in case you’ve been living under a rock, I’ll repeat them once more. “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” Schmidt argued, “If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines – including Google – do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”
“That was Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, telling you exactly what he thinks about your privacy. There is no ambiguity, no ‘out of context’ here,” Dotzler writes, “And here’s how you can easily switch Firefox’s search from Google to Bing (yes, Bing does have a better privacy policy than Google).”
Personally, the most important reason why I find Schmidt’s words upsetting is that for me, as a Dutch citizen, the Patriot Act bears absolutely no relevance. If this was really all about the Patriot Act, then at least Google could make sure that data on international users was handled differently – but I doubt it. Lest we forget, a company like Google, which makes most of its revenue through advertising, benefits greatly from data retention – things like the Patriot Act provide them with the perfect excuse to do so.
The Mozilla-Google relationship is an interesting one, and Dotzler’s words only makes it more complicated than it already is. About 97% of Mozilla’s income comes from Google, so the search giant plays a vital role in the development of not only Chrome, but also Firefox. The relationship between the two got interesting when Chrome arrived, and when Google Chrome Frame was announced, Mozilla expressed concerns it could “fragment the web”. This latest spat doesn’t do anything to warm the waters.
Mozilla isn’t urging users to switch to Bing. Rather, Mozilla’s director of community development, writing on his own blog, is doing so. If Google threatens to cut off funding, we might see Mozilla looking for a new director of community development.
The title says “Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler”…not Mozilla.
Title is accurate.
Maybe he means that Asa isn’t really a representative for Mozilla? After all, only 93+% of Google hits for “Asa Dotzler” are related to Mozilla:
http://tinyurl.com/yb58avw (65,700 hits)
http://tinyurl.com/yb2g4wx (4880 hits)
And he’s not exactly the most well known Mozilla personality. He’s second to Mitchell Baker.
Edited 2009-12-12 18:26 UTC
Yes, after it has been corrected. The original title read “Mozilla Urges Users to Switch to Bing”.
Mozilla should just advocate using no search engine entirely if they have privacy concerns. Do they really think ms is going to be any more respectful of it than google?
Still, the irony of Mozilla telling people to switch to an ms product is unbelievable. As for me, I won’t be switching to bing simply because, imho, its results are pure crap.
It’s really not that bad anymore. Google is better, but I would use bing over anything else.
Bing “commercial”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaFY7hVxjek
If you ask me that’s a little bit scary! LOL
I didn’t say their marketing wasn’t abrasive or moronic (this is microsoft we are talking about), but their results really aren’t that bad. If I couldn’t use google, I would use that.
Not bad? The results are awful. I searched for SQL Server 2008 SP1, seeking the link to download it, and it was nowhere on the first three pages, while it was Google’s first hit.
But unsurprisingly (is this a word?), every time I give Bing a try, 8 out of the first 10 results are related to some online shop… I suppose Microsoft receives a small cut of every sale made via Bing.
I just tried it now, and the download link was the second result
Shame on you
If you want to download ANYTHING, you simply add “download” to your query terms.
I just did that for you and the pack shows as the first hit at the official MS download site. It always helps a great deal if you actually know what you are searching for. Other than that, I am not too convinced by Bing.
Haha! Good one
That is so funny 
Thanks for the link. That reminds me on that “YVAN EHT NIOJ” episode from the Simpsons hehe except that here MS is imagining an army of Bing users as they are pre-programming kids’ minds so later on they’d think the world revolves around Bing. Kind of sad but they will soon discover there is a world out there outside Bing. Just a matter of time. Google is too powerful for MS to swallow.
As I said in the past, I don’t mind MS but I certainly mind Bing, I simply do not trust its results and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Regardless the privacy, I’d continue to use Google search however I wouldn’t even touch ChromeOS with a 10 foot pole. I like Google, I hate ChromeOS (for many reasons), I love the Android operating system. I love Windows 7, I hate Windows based cell phones.
maybe, but at least for me, I can’t support (by using) a company’s service that advocates the end of internet as we know it, advocating charges to index content and playing with content providers to block rivals.
The day internet can’t be indexed by search engines, is the day internet has failed to be.
I think he has a valid point, to some degree.
Basically my opinion is – very much like in operating systems – that diversity is a good thing.
It would be good for both business and users if there would be more than one “relevant” search engine. This would also help the hot topic of privacy; a single party couldn’t correlate different data sets so easily.
And if Microsoft is forced to include a browser ballot, Firefox should be forced to include all relevant search engines by default.
Finally, I don’t think Bing is that bad, actually.
Edited 2009-12-11 18:54 UTC
While Google’s policies raise concerns, in the US, the Patriot Act requires both Bing and Google to retain way more information about searches than necessary, and both search engines have a strong incentive to make money off of search by targeting ads, which is most effectively done by tracking and building profiles on users. They don’t need to know your name, but they’ll want to know what user #23451247 is interested in, what his/her kinks are, how to persuade user #23451247 to buy stuff, and they’ll want to sell that information to advertisers, who can then correlate that profile with profiles from elsewhere that will allow a name to be attached.
Exactly. I just switched my primary search engine to Bing today. The writing is on the wall (at least for me). I’m using way too many google services.
How strange that I actually find myself hoping for Microsoft to succeed in the search space.
[ disclosure: I am a Linux / FreeBSD / OSX user. Haven’t run Windows since the year 2004. ]
Come on with the website preview on the mouseover, with the visual search, with the pretty good results in regard to all my searches, with the cashback offers, and now even with bing maps getting photosynth support i still dont get why people arent flocking to bing, google is so lackluster of late.
I have never received the results I was searching for when using bing… it is in fact that bad
I wonder what yahoo’s policies are … and there is always dogpile…
Once upon a time I was an InfoSeek fan. Remember InfoSeek? If not, then I feel old.
I didn’t much like Yahoo at the time, HotBot was bad, Lycos was OK (but didn’t exist yet when I chose InfoSeek), WebCrawler was almost as bad as HotBot… InfoSeek was the best of the bad choices. AskJeeves was cool, but mostly useless.
No matter which one you chose searching was a kind of an art form. You had to know what boolean meant and you had to be able to figure out the right keywords and logical connections or you didn’t get very good results. I was good at this and often assisted others with crafting queries.
At a certain point the search sites all started becoming “Portals”–starting with yahoo. Each page had a banner ad, or two or three, a bunch of unrelated content, and the front page loaded really slowly… and the search results always stayed about the same: awful.
Every time a new search engine came out I tried it and found no improvement over the other search engines. Then, one day, InfoSeek went away and was replaced by Go, which was much worse. I started using Yahoo and Lycos, the best of the remainder.
One day I heard about a new one called Google. I went to its front page which loaded over 28.8 like it was in my local cache. I tried some simple questions and–ready for it?–got good results, which also loaded like they were in my local cache. I tried complex queries and found that my results were *better* if I didn’t try to use boolean logic… in fact, google seemed to be saying it was ignoring my AND, OR and parentheses!
Since that day I have tried every search contender to come along, just as I had before. In every case I repeat my usual tests: Simple queries, complex queries. I take it for a spin and I see what it can do. In every case every search engine since google has been one of:
1) Slower to load front page or results or both.
2) Provides less useful results.
Tried Yahoo lately? Every now and then I go there and try to use it as my search engine. Typically I spend 10 minutes being unable to find what I want, swap back to Google hand have it in seconds.
Google search is not king through some fickle chance, It’s not like Windows where its parent company strong-armed the competition until their own product was number one. Google is on top because Google search is better.
I am not a Google fan boy, I’d drop then like a hot potato the minute there was something as good, nevermind better. So far nothing is as good. Bing is really, really not as good.
What’s more, I don’t care one bit for any of Bing’s “extra” features. I don’t want a shitload of javascript grinding in the background. I want a plain, empty page with a search box, a button, and a simple unordered list of results each with a link and maybe (*maybe*) a preview of some contents of the page. Adding other things is only acceptable of there is zero performance hit.
Agreed. I tried bing out for a few days, and I found while the results were pretty good, all the extra crap that had little to nothing to do with search is retarded.
The results are as good as google for some kinds of searches and far worse for others. Maybe if I used it for longer I’d find some kind of searches where Bing beats Google, but I am not holding my breath; Bing would still have all of its other flaws.
I remember when Altavista was my engine of choice!
Yes the good old days – my personal web page came up as the first response to a search on my (real) name. Now its hard to find me lost in all others in a recent google search. Still there weren’t a lot of web pages back in ’96.
Jup, those where the days
Especially since you could simply ask “How to use a hammer?” and it would actually give a reasonable result.
Google still won’t advertise to ask questions in plain english/dutch or whatever language.
I switched from altavista to google when altavista had a lot of ads and google just had a few ads on the side. Altavista started adding ads like “search-results”… Hm, sounds familiar? That’s the moment I start hating any searchengine.
Time to start an open source searchengine?
WOW… THAT LOOKS CLEAN TO ME!
http://www.altavista.com/web/results?itag=ody&q=osnews&kgs=1&kls=0
Edited 2009-12-12 10:53 UTC
The thing that pushed me from AltaVista to Google was that while AltaVista just maintained a FAQ entry explaining why it’s impossible to show the search terms in context, Google was actually doing it.
I still remember when the Yahoo homepage would fit on a 640×480 display without scrolling. For my money, they started going down the tubes when they ditched the old-school grey background (AKA the default that older Netscape versions used, if no bgcolor was specified).
when i started using altavista it had the url altavista.digital.com
Edited 2009-12-13 01:53 UTC
Don’t feel old. Infoseek was my favorite, until Google came out, and I’m still young.
EDIT: Remember when Yahoo had the simple default grey background? Oh, those were the days.
Edited 2009-12-11 21:43 UTC
Oh yes, it all went down hill when they started using white.
Of course those were also the days where I actually had to bookmark things to be able to find them again later.
Hotbot was my engine of choice for a while (it was the only one that could find my former high school’s page). I got bitter when Opera dropped Hotbot integration and I modded it back in. I finally broke down and tried their new default: Google. Needless to say I was sold.
What?
No Altavista?
I’ve personally begun to use Cuil.com more and more.
According to my weblogs for the multiple websites the company I work for hosts…
CUIL does not respect robots.txt.
In fact, from those same logs, it appears that CUIL uses robots.txt as a roadmap as to use to scrape a site.
Good luck using CUIL.
totally agree, i use search engine to search, not to load bunch of javascript and big image on its front page
You should use this http://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/fullnotice.mspx instead of the short one.
And btw: “we have built-in technological and procedural safeguards designed to prevent the unauthorized correlation of this data.” means that there can be authorized correlation of this data.
I think there can’t be much difference between both, as they all want that information.
Actually, it doesn’t mean that at all. It means “we have built-in technological and procedural safeguards designed to prevent the unauthorized correlation of this data.”
But feel free to spread the fear.
disease
bing in chinese means alot of things, and I’m pretty sure you know that if you know that it can mean disease 😮 Anyway, that’s pretty irrelevant to the conversation.
Apparently, Microsoft Corp has offered Mozilla Corp more money for less effort than has Google, Inc. Asa has always been a pretty reliable weather vane on that count.
Edited 2009-12-11 19:39 UTC
” sbergman27 Apparently, Microsoft Corp has offered Mozilla Corp more money for less effort than has Google, Inc.”
What a crock a crap.
Edited 2009-12-12 17:37 UTC
I’ll betcha I’m right, though. There will be a carefully worded announcement pertaining to this sometime in the next month or so. 🙂
It makes perfect sense for MS to offer. It would be surprising if they didn’t now that they’ve kicked their search efforts into high gear. And if MS offered and Mozilla turned it down, Mozilla Corp would be playing that PR card all over the Internet. But they aren’t. Instead, they have a well known Mozilla rep unofficially floating this trial balloon in his blog.
Microsoft has recently offered Mozilla a truck-load of money, and Mozilla Corp wants to accept it. Just watch.
Edited 2009-12-12 17:57 UTC
That seems fairly plausible. Microsoft has already offered to pay individual websites to list with Bing (and not Google) – and Mozilla gets paid by Google for searches done through the Firefox default homepage, the search field, etc. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to hear that Microsoft has made a similar offer to Mozilla, or that Mozilla has “shopped around” with search providers.
IMO Microsoft is sufficiently pragmatic (or sufficiently mercenary, depending on how you look at it) to do something like that. I’m sure that they would prefer if everyone used IE on Windows, but they’ll happily “settle” for the consolation prize of having people use Microsoft services with Firefox.
It is irrelevant whether you are a Dutch citizen, just as it is irrelevant to be visiting a foreign country as a Dutch citizen. You still have to respect the local laws.
How does that matter? Since any Google service probably interacts with servers in the United States, all information passing through those servers must comply with United States Law. One of those laws is the Patriot Act.
For example: I don’t think this is a Patriot Act provision, but one major change to FISA law after the attacks of 11 Sep 2001 was to make it easier the government to track terrorist communications (& other criminal activity) that transpire abroad and where information is routed through the United States. I recall cell phone communications being cited as a specific example here, but I don’t know the mechanism so if that’s bogus don’t flame me; I’m just reporting what they said.
The point is: you’re living in Holland under Dutch Law, but the people providing your services live in the United States, under US law. The fact that you are a Dutch citizen diminishes the relevance of the Patriot Act no less than if you were physically visiting the US.
If you want complete privacy with your searches try https://ssl.scroogle.org/ Google tracks your search as coming from Scroogle and Scroogle wipes the true IP of the person searching, and it is also encrypted between you and the Scroogle servers as it searches Google.
You can get the Firefox and IE plugin for Scroogle here http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?name=scroogle It also has it for other languages and can get the plugin for encrypted or not encrypted. Apparently on their home page scroogle.org the even have it for use encrypted or not encrypted for Chrome and Opera. Tell me that is not a sting, having encrypted anonymous searches in Chrome!
Thanks – nice service. (I’d vote you up but I already commented here.)
Privacy concerns aside i could NEVER use bing its utter garbage. Results are almost always some corporate producte i have no interest in and when i am searching for a “product” it still fails.. (anti microsoft bias aside lol) Like others have said just use scroogle if you have privacy concerns. Atleast google dashboard shows you what info they have collected if youd like to know. Unlike other providers.
Gotta get those clicks up, right?
Where do you get
“Mozilla Urges Users to Switch to Bing”
from
“And here’s how you can easily switch Firefox’s search from Google to Bing. (Yes, Bing does have a better privacy policy than Google.)”
Yeah, that sure sounds like the entire Mozilla Foundation telling people to switch. :/
I know the guy works for Mozilla. I get it. But it’s a personal blog posting from one guy. Let’s not exaggerate.
…bills itself as the “world’s most private search engine.”
http://www.ixquick.com/
This search engine has come a long way since it started (it had quite a bit of ground to cover) and the results are only now starting to be useful for me. But, I assume it will get even better as time passes.
Even better: Clusty
They don’t advertise with privacy, because it’s normal for them.
Instead they advertise with clustering!
Search engine: http://clusty.com/
Their POV: http://clusty.com/privacy
Their PP: http://clusty.com/privacypolicy
I have been using it for a long time and I’ve never seen a search engine, which allows you to find stuff that fast.
Oh and they are a metasearchengine, so the index is also big.
If you want googles search results in an anonymous way use Scroogle:
http://scroogle.org/
Edited 2009-12-12 14:44 UTC
I guess it doesn’t come as a shock to many of you, but many American companies receive funding from the upper level of government (including the Army) so that’s why Schmidt wants to make them happy and he obeys them, otherwise be sure we’d see something dirty about Google.
Microsoft’s not less dirty unluckily and they paid this guy in my opinion. They have employed so much viral marketing that they can make an advertisement page look like genuine opinions. Also iirc they were helped my MS on some things.
Unfortunately the way search engines are done it’s very difficult we will see some new player which doesn’t suck as much as the current ones, that’s why they have an even deeper interest in keeping you with them and they do email services and such.
I urge people to move away from Mozilla!
I don’t think that all the privacy debate should *just* focus on Google. I goes much further than that.
Thom, I think Google CEO just told you the truth. You don’t have to be so irritated and think Microsoft will not do the same thing, as they disregarded the report of their cooperation with NSA during Win7 development.
They didn’t disregard it, they denied it out right. That myth dates back to NT 4.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-windows-7-nsa-backdoor,9…
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/03/windows.nsa.02/
Edited 2009-12-12 14:23 UTC
Mozilla seems to have lost focus on their software how about a production browser that passes acid3 or process per tab or the fastest javascript or…
If they excelled at what should be their core focus, making software, they could more strategically influence people rather than well meaning but awkward statements like this.
Save the rain forest by using http://www.forestle.org/ as search engine.
It’s Yahoo-powered.
Its brother Znout http://www.znout.org is Google-powered, but only CO2-neutral, because Google denied to cooperate.
Neither Forestle nor Znout pass Yahoo’s/Google’s cookies to through the user, hence increasing the privacy as a byproduct.
yahoo will soon be powered by bing
So? Any indicator that Forestle will stop working then?
i will never use anything from microsoft
I don’t understand this. I read their “How it works” page in which they say that the advertising revenue generated from use of their site is donated to the Adopt an Acre program of the Nature Conservancy. And that each search generates roughly enough revenue to protect about a sqare foot. So I turned off my Epiphany AdBlocker extension because I highly approve of this use of ad revenue. But… they don’t seem to have any ads.
Edited 2009-12-13 14:44 UTC
Maybe there are no ads for your territory yet.
I get ads when I enter a common term like “car”.
All those rainforest saving web sites are light-scams (there are several of them). MS is behind them either through Bing or yahoo.
Have you proof that Forestle is a scam? Do you have proof that ad revenue is not donated to proper organizations?
Me, an unknown guy, urges users to switch to Scroogle.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12506
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?name=scroogle
A good search engine that rivaled Google is alltheweb.com, it was promising some good features, but then was bought by Yahoo. Didn’t took off and even lost some features.
Edited 2009-12-12 17:49 UTC
Comparing Bing and Google based solely on their privacy policies reminds me a bit of a quote that was attributed to Winston Churchill:
“I may be drunk – but you, madame, are ugly. And in the morning, I shall be sober.”
In other words, I suspect that it would be easier for Google to adjust their privacy policy than it would be for Microsoft to improve Bing to the point where it’s as effective as Google.
Yeah, that was a good one. Privacy policies can be ammended, at any time, in whatever direction the company issuing it feels is best for their business model at the time. And, of course, if the local law, somewhere in the world “compels” them to violate it… well… what can they do?
One thing’s for certain. When you deal in information, you need talented folks in PR, to reassure the population.
Edited 2009-12-12 19:40 UTC
Incidentally that reminds of a beautiful newspaper photo I saw a few years back, of the Canadian privacy commissionaire standing ankle-deep in printed personal health records that had been dumped on a public street.
There was a film that was being shot in Toronto; it was set in New York, so the production company ordered some waste paper from a shredding company to litter-up a street and make it look more authentic. Due to a mix-up, the paper shredding company delivered print copies of the health records of several thousand individuals (which they were supposed to have destroyed), instead of the waste paper.
After hearing about Schmitt’s comment yesterday, I decided to switch away from Google. I tried Cuil, but it’s results just weren’t that great. Then I tried Bing and found it to be on par with Google; so I switched my default search engine to Bing.
Why? Because MS does not have the balls to say the same truth?
After looking at the entire segment. It’s obvious the topic was about the Patriot Act. I’m sorry but the reality is that what he said is true. If you are searching something online and you don’t want the authorities to know about it, then don’t freaking search using a search engine. If you have an issue with a search engine keeping your search history for a period of time, then don’t search. All search engines, including Bing, keeps data. It’s required. People should read and make decisions for themselves before making decisions based off one person. As for Bing Privacy Policy. http://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/bing.mspx <– is a short version. As noted within that same link is the FULL notice. http://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/fullnotice.mspx. Use Bing because you like it, not because someone else rants.
Agreed. If you’re concerned about privacy over your search results for angioplasty, too bad. If you’re concerned about privacy because of identity theft, that’s security not privacy. If you’re concerned about privacy because you don’t want the government to know what you are doing, then what are you doing!? Consider everything you do on the internet as being in public, then ask yourself, “Is that so awful?”
Try http://www.bing-vs-google.com/
Its funny the “exodus” that has happened over this comment. Especially since his comment is true. The fact you think MS would have your back in a STATE or FEDERAL investigation is laughable.
Cause this type of act is what the CEO was talking about and the PA is the trump card.
He does have a valid point, do you want a company that could give a crap about your privacy. Then they want control of your OS and personal data.