Comment 14 for bug 405350

Martin: I clarified this in many places. Let's do this again.

The summary of my concern (and of others) is that the current search page looks like "google", as much as to induce your average user to think that he is searching on google.

It is not advertized on the page that the search engine is a custom one.

Ubuntu makes money out of the resulting advertizing, and the search results _can_ be altered by ubuntu, which is a smaller community than google. Users are now trusting ubuntu AND google, not google directly.

I am not saying this ain't no good to ubuntu. I am all for it, but not in the current form. Not hidden like a spypare usually is.

A honest search page would be exactly like the current one, but with a clear advertisement that the search engine is not google. Like everyone else using a CSE does. There should be a visible sentence, perhaps a bit below the search box, saying like "this page is a modified google. Searching trough this helps ubuntu." with a link to more information.

Instead, the current search page is designed to make one think that he is searching directly on the main search engine. Most users tend to think that ubuntu does only "good" things, and not "evil" ones (here evil is used in the sense of the famous "don't be evil" by google). This is because ubuntu advertises itself as such. This is the trust breakage as I perceive it.

My (not so) secret suspect is that the page is designed that way _precisely_ to advertise it as a standard google page, in order to minimize the number of users that change it. That /would/ be really evil, wouldn't it.