This leaves me with conflicting emotions. I don't know where the easiest place to find the actual explanation of the change is (not very familiar with Debian development practices) but I wonder if it clears things up.
Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
21–30 of 222 posts
Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
#22Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
#23DDG is for-profit and serves for the most part Bing results. Why not pick something truly open, like search.marginalia.nu?
Probably because one doesn’t exist? That particular example isn’t a general purpose search engine.
Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
#24DDG is for-profit and serves for the most part Bing results. Why not pick something truly open, like search.marginalia.nu?
I think you're confusing for-profit, opensource and, as I assume would be the motive behind this switch, at least relatively privacy protecting?
Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
#25Oh, no! All the people buying Debian desktops at Best Buy will be locked into issues with DDG forever.
Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Common? Probably not. It's not unheard of though. See: Ubuntu.
It was so cool to have amazon snoop on your presumably local searches...
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.
Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
#27DDG is for-profit and serves for the most part Bing results. Why not pick something truly open, like search.marginalia.nu?
Quoted post unavailable.
We (at DuckDuckGo) actually have no current relationship (or commercial deal) with Debian. They did this on their own. That is, there is no revenue share here.
Also, we no longer use the Amazon affiliate program, or Yahoo for that matter, and we don't (and never have had) any idea what any individual bought.
Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
#28Some unintended consequences: > This change caused my chromium browser to report that it's being managed by my "organization". I thought that my machine was somehow compromised. This is terrifying! I wound up deleting my entire chromium profile before I discovered that the root cause was this DuckDuckGo config change. https://bugs.debian.org/956012
Sounds like a Chromium bug, not a Debian bug--it's an insidious way to keep Google search as the default.
Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
#29Some unintended consequences: > This change caused my chromium browser to report that it's being managed by my "organization". I thought that my machine was somehow compromised. This is terrifying! I wound up deleting my entire chromium profile before I discovered that the root cause was this DuckDuckGo config change. https://bugs.debian.org/956012
Fedora did this for a while to inject the word "Fedora" into the User Agent. They eventually stopped because users were similarly spooked.
Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
#30Some unintended consequences: > This change caused my chromium browser to report that it's being managed by my "organization". I thought that my machine was somehow compromised. This is terrifying! I wound up deleting my entire chromium profile before I discovered that the root cause was this DuckDuckGo config change. https://bugs.debian.org/956012
Sounds like a Chromium bug, not a Debian bug--it's an insidious way to keep Google search as the default.
Reporting that there is a policy is no bug, but maybe there should be a way to signify that it's customized by your software vendor (i.e. signed and keys are compiled in) and that it just sets the default search engine.
Chromium does change the message to "This device is managed by " if attached to Chrome Enterprise.