Bing (the little search engine that could)
…launches and begins to gain a little market share and Google overreacts with an “everything, including the kitchen sink” of product launches. Virtually overwhelming the searching consumer, Google responds with such products as Google Goggles, Real Time Search (a complete waste of resources in this observer’s opinion) and now a new phone, as well as over 499 Google Chrome plugins, including Safari compatibility with its Google Chrome web browser to remind you of who’s swinging the biggest stick, and it appears to be working.
Headline after headline has reinvigorated the idea that search can expand and adapt just as any industry, and Google seems poised to remain the dominant leader, unless privacy is important to you asserts Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler who latched onto this little ditty by Google CEO, Eric Schmidt in a CNBC interview:
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines–including Google–do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”
Switch to Bing, and here’s how
Dotzler, the Director of Community Relations for Mozilla points out,
That was Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, telling you exactly what he thinks about your privacy. There is no ambiguity, no “out of context.”
Dotzler then offers instructions on how to switch your brower’s settings inserting,
“yes, Bing does have a better privacy policy than Google.”
Mozilla Developer Relations Director Christopher Blizzard said on Twitter,
“Everyone knows that every site you visit and all address bar searches in Chrome go to Google, right?”
The spark heard round the world is Privacy
After a weekend of Facebook news on privacy updates, as well as TOS updates designed to force its users into the public square, it looks as if Mozilla may be offering up some neutral ground argument as it has no stake in the search game except as the user conduit to access any one of the social media spaces and search engines that seek to capitalize on your human data.
(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)
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Consumerism, Geo-mapping columnist
Marketing columnist
Excellent points. As Google continues to roll out more and more products/tools for consumers to use, privacy is going to become a growing concern. Google already has access to an astounding amount of information with things like gmail, Google docs, etc. They know people’s schedules: when people are checking email, when they are working, and from where they are connecting to their services. And if the information exists, it has the potential to be stolen by others (hackers, etc).
As far as switching from Google to Bing, Bing has improved quite a bit since the release, but they need to continue to improve their search results to sway consumers over to their engine. Hopefully they can stay the course and give Google some competition.
Jon: Google voice users can expect that all their phone conversations are sitting on a Google server, as well.
I´ve been having some truble letely with the last version of the firefox. I have the impression that sometimes they go too fast and some themes or extentions don´t work.
I now see my “Google Alerts” showing my “Twitter tweets”… and I hardly tweet compared to the big guns who seem to tweet every 49 seconds!