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Windows Defense on IE7 Search is No Defense
Vicegrip writes "Stan Beer writes on why Microsoft's and recently Yahoo's supportive arguments for making Windows Live Search the default in IE7 are feeble: "In the case of Google, it pays hard cash to Mozilla and Dell to get the right to have its search engine placed as the default in the browsers.[... by contrast ...] Microsoft does not need to pay one cent to place its search engine in the lead position on its browser, which sits on the vast majority of PCs in the world"."
They are. Except for IMDB and Encarta. When you hit "Add search providers" it takes you to this page. If IMDB and Encarta supported OpenSearch, they could be there too.
I recognize that the original poster already said that wasn't what he was going for, but being someone who works in tech support, I have to disagree with you. A very significant percentage of people (I'd estimate about 75%) are ignorant, stupid, lazy, or a combination (by my definitions, of course). The ignorant won't know about Google and will use what's given to them. Barring someone coming along and saying "hey Google is way better" they won't bother. The stupid won't be able to figure out how to change it (this is not MS's fault, though I'm a Linux fan myself MS does a good job of making things easy, but even MS can't do much for the disturbingly many people who can't figure out how to right-click). The lazy won't bother to change it. Thus MS can leverage their OS monopoly to muscle in on a new market. Which is illegal.