Parannoyed Delusions

Interesting site I found via digg:

"We once had a link behind the image, to download Firefox. But they sold their soul, and we no longer recommend them." - Scroogle.org

I hate to read really well-written and truthful-looking things that shake any part a long-held belief of mine. Before this it was Michael Crichton's State of Fear which changed my view on global warming, but then I reverted back once I read sites like RealClimate and WorldChanging (more on this in a later post perhaps).

This time it's my belief in a good piece of open source software called Firefox. Or more accurately, on Mozilla, the non-profit organization behind Firefox. Let me just do a copy-and-paste quote:

In June 2005, we read that a Silicon Valley blogger with alleged insider information was reporting that the Mozilla Foundation was raking in $30 million annually from their Google connection.

To which I asked, what Google connection? Well, this (from the same site):

Apparently the bulk of the money from Google is due to Mozilla's agreement to make Google the default engine in the Firefox search box. When a Firefox user clicks on an ad from a Google-box search, Mozilla gets a cut of Google's profit.

That's not all:

If you enter search terms in the location bar instead of a web URL address, Firefox goes to Google and picks off the top link, and takes you directly to that site. [...] If you try the same thing in Explorer, you get a search preview from MSN, but you aren't sent directly to the top site. Microsoft's behavior is less intrusive because it gives the user more options.

A non-profit, open source project being more intrusive than Microsoft? Well, the news about Mozilla spinning off into a for-profit corporation seems to fuel some sort of confirmation on this, I would say.

The site I'm quoting, Scroogle.org is actually a site advocating the scraping of Google and Yahoo! search results, effectively stripping off all those ads:

These engines crawl the public web without asking permission, and cache and reproduce the content without asking permission, and then use this information as a carrier for ads that generate private profit.

They give good, solid arguments, too:

The larger issue here is that the commercialization of the web became possible only because tens of thousands of noncommercial sites made the web interesting in the first place. All search engines should make a stable, bare-bones, ad-free, easy-to-scrape version of their results available for those who want to set up nonprofit repeaters. Even if it cuts into their ad profits slightly, there's no easier way to give back some of what they stole from us.

Well, this would probably irk some of those weblogs existing and pinging PPS "solely" for Google Adsense, I'd say.

So, does this mean I'm going to stop using Firefox? Well, no for now I guess. Because like I said, Firefox is a good piece of software. But I'm definately going to start avoiding direct Google searches though...

Update: While typing a reply to a comment here, I thought it would be more appropriate if I added it in the post itself. Is what Google doing really wrong? I thought it was, because I believe blatant commercialism without a shred of community responsibility or a "give back to community" ideal IS wrong. But then again, Google has in fact given back to the community, with projects like Summer of Code, it's pages like Google Labs, and also the availability of it's API. I don't know, I'm beginning to get mixed feelings about this.