The choices inside Ubuntu

“Hearing that the next Ubuntu release will use Yahoo! as the
default search engine in Firefox leaves me with a twinge of
uneasiness. My misgiving — and it’s a small one — is not so much
with the decision as with why it was made.

“In itself, the decision is trivial enough. If you dislike
Yahoo!, you can easily change the default by going to the search
engine field in the upper right corner and clicking on the icon and
choosing Manage Search Engines from the drop-down menu.

“More importantly, to my surprise, comparing half a dozen sets
of search results in Google and Yahoo! suggests that Yahoo!
generally returns more results than Google — often at a ratio of
three or four to one. Nor are the first page results very different
in the two search engines. Yahoo!’s image searches are generally
less successful than Google, but otherwise, from a practical
viewpoint, the change in the default may actually be an
improvement.”

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