Google Bundles Toolbar With Adobe Apps

grammar fascist writes "Sci-Tech Today reports that Google is paying a 'significant amount' to bundle Google Toolbar with certain Adobe downloads. From the article: 'The initial venue for the Google mini-app will be downloads of the popular and free Shockwave multimedia player. The move is seen by some observers as an effort to outflank Microsoft, especially as Internet Explorer 7 nears its formal launch this summer [...] Interestingly, Google's search toolbar will be available only when Shockwave is downloaded for use with Internet Explorer on Windows.'"

Comments

Re:Google crazyness..

[uvajed_ekil]

Google Desktop seemed to be working fine as a search tool, until one day I started Internet Explorer. All of a sudden my firewall started warning me of outgoing connections from GoogleDesktopDisplay.exe, and ads started popping up from my taskbar. Even after closing IE, this continued, and after searching the preferences and terms of service for Google Desktop and finding nothing about this "feature", I have now banished this Google spyware from my system.

I use Google for searches and for unimportant email, but I know the company is not my friend, as they would like me to believe. But I won't use other Google software that has to much access to my computer without necessarily telling me everything it is doing. And I won't run IE except in very rare circumstance when Firefox or Opera can't load a page I really ned to get to. I suspect Google will sell-out a lot of security or usability for ad revenue.

Already happening, really

[JLSigman]

We install Shockwave and Adobe Reader on all of the computer at work. Right now, Shockwave wants to install Yahoo toolbar and Adobe wants to install Google toolbar and desktop. I guess Yahoo's about to be out of luck?

web -1.0

[Anonymous Coward]

The WWW was initially all about information: it is a way so people can publish data, people can get the data and they can follow the right hyperlinks that lead to other related data. It is a distributed, cooperative, data sharing thing.

Now we have a new kind of WWW applications. It's applications that use the web browser as their GUI platform and run in the web browser. Such applications are, advanced word processors, spreadsheets, e-mail readers and eventually the Browser In The Browser secret project google's been working on. These applications have NOTHING to do with the concept of the WEB.

It is "scripts" for the IE/Mozilla program, like java programs for the JVM, C# programs for .NET, perl and python scripts, etc. The difference is that everybody has one of those two browsers, so the user does not have to download anything and that there is no need to install the application since it is downloaded and executed by visiting the URL. Some programmers have convinced some stupid venture capitalists, that this is the next big thing, and the news about AJAX circulates to attract more venture capitalists to spend more money to buy AJAX. Not a bad idea.

But for the users, the IE/Mozilla platform is the most insecure way to run their applications. Their application is constantly connected to the internet. Both browsers have numerous vunerabilities and new ones are discovered every day. The application downloads and "runs" new data, very often without the user knowing about it (through hidden javascript links and the flash player). The user cannot trace, debug or even study the AJAX code that runs on their IE/Mozilla platform. Through asynchronous javascript and flash, binary proprietary code runs on their PC with full priviledges. And to all these add that javascript is a terrible programming language and that the GUI in the browser was designed for forms and was never good for things like an interactive text shell. \paragraph

The result is that you get poor applications, that are slow, very insecure, do things without the user's control and it's a Mozilla/IE lockin.
That is Web -1.0

Is it

[Konster]

Is it time for an Open Source Search Engine?

We already have a *pretty* good free OS in the form of Linux, we already have *pretty* good apps for it. Why settle for Google or MSN Search or Yahoo search or whatever? I should think that a massively distributed OS search engine should do pretty well.

Forgive the semantics, focus on the idea.

Use a bit torrent style method of sharing bandwidth. Say one lonely PC can store 100mb of data, 15mb of which can be shared on the internet per day to save end-user costs x the number of Linux installs, prolly not a bad use for distributed computing and bandwidth sharing if I have ever heard of one.

Open Source Search Engine.

The time is now. :)

Re:Is it

[Chabil Ha']

I think that the FOSS Search Engine would die a quick death. Here's why: Part of making a search engine is obfuscating the algorithm used to produce results. Sure, we all know that be putting in key words, etc. in the meta-tags helps the spiders find and catalogue a site. However, there are measures in place to help reduce the amount of search engine spamming that occurs. This algorithm isn't 100% effective, but it does a pretty good job. Now, if you have that algorithm out in the open, the incentive for not only spammers, but those you honestly want higher results are going to leverage that knowledge to artificially boost their page ranking. This kind of defeats the purpose of 'organic' search results. This means that the crap ends up coming up at the top, translating into a dissatisfied customer.

Competition

[Ajehals]

Microsoft looks like it could be getting into bed with Yahoo (to compete with Google apparently) whilst adding technology that mimics PDF functionality (XPS the XML Paper Standard (that competes with Adobe)) into the core of its next OS. Now Adobe gets into bed with the company that is giving Microsoft a headache over search and online applications. This could be a very clear case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend....

Hmmmm, This is either simply Google bidding the most for their tool bar to be bundled with some very widely used software, or the battle lines within the IT sector are getting a little more defined.

Personally I would prefer to be able to download and install an application that does whatever the job is I want doing; without installing any other "useful" application's - regardless of which "well selected" partner it comes from. However from a non technical perspective this may well become interesting.

Now to me it is starting to look as though Microsoft are feeling less in control of their ability to "lock" users to their software. This appears to be the reason for the plethora of new proprietary file formats that they can force into the main stream with Vista. It will be interesting to see if there is any fight against the formats or if the rest of the software industry will carry out its own embrace and extend exercise... After all this time round they are not providing "new" functionality but rather revamping existing standards and encroaching on other companies areas of expertise.

Google should add a decent dedicated document search feature that is purely an index of ODF, PDF, Rich/Plain Text etc.. and exclude XPS until it sees mainstream use at least, and offer links to - the original document - html version - adobe acrobat / open office. Im not certain if Adobe will or even should, but I would also like to see adobe and open office support the XPS standard for reading, if not necessarily for export.