Comment 16 for bug 305905
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| Vincenzo Ciancia (vincenzo-ml) wrote | #16 |
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0e1f616
(Get the code!)
This all started more than one year ago; for one year I tried to get to something, because I liked and like ubuntu. I do not think canonical or ubuntu are evil entities, but the matter of the home page, which is probably the application that every ubuntu user will use more frequently every day, is not handled in the right way and your users are not aware of that.
I do not want to "insinuate" anything. If I am wrong, I will just stand corrected. However, from your words above I don't understand if I got what a CSE is wrong, or you don't even know what it is. What I will state now is based on obious facts that everyone can verify, so if they are not true, just explain me why.
I looked at the form action URL in the default ubuntu firefox home page
http://
The source code of the page reads
<form action="http://
so the submit URL is not www.google.com, but rather www.google.com/cse. It is certainly TRUE that googe is the provider of both services, but as far as I know they are rather different services.
The "cse" or "custom search engine" service that you use in the home page permits a third party (in this case ubuntu) to configure the search engine, deciding what sites are indexed and what not, and perhaps also to alter the order in which results are presented. Moreover, the use of the CSE seems related to the presence of much more prominent advertising in the results page, which should generate revenue for the third party in question.
I do not think it is bad to make revenue for an open source project that way, but users should know. This is a matter of transparency, you may have a different position, but you should at least agree that "cse" and "/" are two different google pages.
The "cse" is probably aimed at providing custom search engines that index single web sites (like most other distributions do) and not to provide an alternative to google, but of course you may use it like that.
What you can not do is to prove to users what your configuration of the CSE is. Therefore, in my opinion you should add a disclaimer somewhere, and link it in the 9.10 start page.