Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Microsoft Changing Users' Default Search Engine

Posted by timothy on from the now-what-did-we-say-about-playground-behavior? dept.

BabyDuckHat writes "Cnet's Dennis O'Reilly caught 'Windows Search Helper' trying to change his default Firefox search from Google to Bing. This isn't the first time the software company has been caught quietly changing user's preferences to benefit its own products."

16 of 389 comments (clear)

  1. Once more with feeling by Nefarious+Wheel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is on the exact same track as the behaviour that brought them their first major antitrust suit. Perhaps the Bing switch is "an essential part of the operating system". Bunk.

    --
    Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
    1. Re:Once more with feeling by seekret · · Score: 5, Funny

      I'm sure they'll find some way of avoiding any type of legal problems, they always do.

    2. Re:Once more with feeling by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Well I made the cardinal sin of reading the article. There is no proof and what he "found" was irrelevant. He said the warning came up about when he booted. Guess what? When you boot ALL the services that are installed and set to auto-start do something - they START. Microsoft didn't do this; at least you sure can't prove it by this idiot. He most likely has some stupid malware/spyware/crapware installed that did it. Shoot, you can post any poorly researched crap on the web these days and people will link to it as long as it says "MS is teh evil".

      I need to have Digg's "OK this is lame" to bury this article.

    3. Re:Once more with feeling by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      If you actualy read the article, he admits he doesnt know what was trying to change the default search provider, or what it was being set to. All he knows is his google toolbar said a change was being made.

      Any atribution of this action to Microsoft, or that the provider was being set to Bing are suppositions - there is no evidence of that provided.

    4. Re:Once more with feeling by gmagill · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yes, too bad it couldn't be modded "Sarcastic" And how many times have they even prevailed? Near constant litigation is just a cost of doing business, eh?

    5. Re:Once more with feeling by fullgandoo · · Score: 5, Informative

      Still better that Safari on Mac which doesn't allow anything but Google as the search engine.

    6. Re:Once more with feeling by Le+Tmraire · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You are clearly not European. There have been many antitrust suits in the past by the European commission against European companies. The problem is that building up a case costs a lot of time. The recent antitrust suit against Microsoft was started in 1998, with a first ruling in 2003. Just to give you some kind of perspective.

  2. Really? by Beatlebum · · Score: 5, Funny

    That's most surprising.

  3. BING by penguin_dance · · Score: 5, Funny

    BING = But It's Not Google

    --
    If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
    1. Re:BING by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Bing Is Not Google

      recursive

  4. Re:Surprise surprise... by Brian+Gordon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You mean like Apple slipping their browser software in with security updates?

  5. Google does it too by LotsOfPhil · · Score: 5, Informative

    Picasa defaults to change your IE search to Google.

    --
    This post climbed Mt. Washington.
  6. Re:Surprise surprise... by lostmongoose · · Score: 5, Informative

    Indeed, also making itunes an optout insted of optin when doing quicktime updates on a windows machine that has no itunes installed.

  7. Parent does have a point... proof? by Animaether · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The guy got this warning when he booted up his computer - then mentions that he didn't give permission to any search engine change. What, after he booted up? I guess not. Perhaps he did so before he shut it down? Perhaps he did so several days ago and whatever he installed* told him that the system would need rebooting to finish installation, and he ignored it (like most people).

    * I'm saying "whatever he installed" because I'm looking at my Vista Business N 32bit install with Internet Explorer 8 (upgraded from 7 a day or two back), and..
    - Google is still (it was in IE7) my first-listed search provider
    - I can find no "Windows Search Helper" service (there's a "Windows Search" service; different thing, presumably)
    - I can find no "Windows Search *anything*" in IE8's Add-ons list.

    Hitting Google with "Windows Search Helper" yields the story and... well.. supposed anti-malware sites that are ever-so-useful in telling me what it is or where it comes from (sarcasm.)

    So for all we know, he installed.. who knows what, something.. and that something may very well have asked him if he wanted to change the default search to Bing.

    I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to do something like this.. but as of yet, my Vista machine isn't showing any evidence of it; nor does the article.

    'course the other part of the article is 'sane'.. letting the google toolbar (if you have that installed anyway) make sure that your default search is Google if you're so-inclined as to have two search fields with the same provider (if I installed it, I'd set the IE8 one to Bing and leave the Google Toolbar one to Google, but that's me... then again, I tend to use Firefox), seems like a pretty good precaution to take.

  8. This is relatively innocuous, compared to by melted · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is relatively innocuous, compared to the thing everyone seems to be missing - namely, IE8's default setting due to which (if you don't disable it during install) it will send all your search queries, browsed page URLs (except in HTTPS mode and on the intranet) and a few other bits and pieces of data to Microsoft for the purpose of "providing you with related sites". Of course the real purpose is to collect data to feed to Bing and adCenter.

    This is why Sergey Brin is running around scared, and this is why Google is releasing their own browser in a hurry (it too sends all your browsing data to Google, for the same purposes).

    You see, IE still has something like 70% marketshare, and all that browsing pattern data is hugely useful for things like:
    1. Discovering new sites not yet within the crawl graph
    2. Improving relevance of search results
    3. Fighting spam
    4. Establishing true popularity metrics for web resources.
    5. Extracting behavioral information for the purposes of ad targeting.
    6. Establishing (through correlation with a truth set) your gender, race, ethnicity, age, income bracket and preferences (for ad targeting, too).
    7. Geolocation
    8. Etc, etc.

    This means MSFT now has ginormous amounts of data it didn't have before, and it can sic their PHDs on it and "fucking kill Google". It is no coincidence that they pushed IE8 as a "mandatory" update. I will not be surprised in the least if within a year Bing has substantially higher relevance than everyone else.

    Google has no answer to this, short of paying Mozilla a ton of money to embed the same thing into Firefox. Since this pretty much amounts to spyware, I doubt Mozilla will go for it.

  9. Lies, damn lies, and statistics by gsasha · · Score: 5, Insightful
    It is of course possible to formulate the selection criteria so that Google will come extremely unprominently shown somewhere at the bottom. Which Microsoft did in this case, quite successfully.

    I actively tried to switch the default search engine to Google, and guess what, it was hard to find even knowing what I'm looking about.

    If I was Google, I'd file an antitrust petition against this NOW.