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Comment by xuhu

4 years ago

Is it common for distros to have deals with search providers in exchange for keeping them as the default in their browsers ?

15 comments

xuhu

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tristan957  4 years ago

As reported in an earlier comment, DDG did not make a deal with Debian for this.

Prior art is that Linux Mint at one point had Yahoo as the default search engine in their Firefox builds. I am not sure whether that is currently the case.

BeefWellington  4 years ago

Common? Probably not.

It's not unheard of though. See: Ubuntu.

  • oblak  4 years ago

    It was so cool to have amazon snoop on your presumably local searches...

    • groovybits  4 years ago

      Citation?

      Lots of folks misremember how the Unity Home Lens feature actually worked, and that the Ubuntu installer explicitly asked you whether you wanted it enabled.

      If enabled, there was no presumption of local-only search. It was front and center in your search results, and the affiliate revenue was only collected when you clicked on that Amazon result.

      Canonical claimed that the search was forwarded to them, and then anonymized to Amazon. That's more than what Microsoft seems to do with Bing results in Windows search, which you can't seem to disable without installing third-party scripts.

      Was it a perfect solution? No - But it was a way to make revenue in an otherwise open-source project and free of cost. Its interesting how on some days, people argue for more money towards FOSS devs, and then others argue that revenue-building systems shouldn't be implemented. Yeah, Canonical makes enterprise investments, but they're obviously weren't in the realm of Red Hat in terms of enterprise support.

      2 replies →

kornhole  4 years ago

I don't know, but that seems like a reasonable funding solution given that Google is expected to pay Apple ~$20B this year: https://dazeinfo.com/2022/01/05/google-pays-apple-for-not-la...

  • pb7  4 years ago

    Apple has hundreds of millions of wealthy customers. Debian does not.

    • kornhole  4 years ago

      They have a few though. Certainly they don't have captive users who only install what they are allowed to and use the default settings. Linux users are probably the worst target market for advertisers.

      3 replies →

aasasd  4 years ago

Pretty sure the negotiations would go approximately like: “Best I can do is fifty bucks.”