Search engines getting a foot in the door

Without the big public being aware of it, there's a war going on out there between search engines trying to get their foot in the door to our computers. For the majority of people a search engine is a commodity: as long as it does the job. Google has proven though with their multi billion revenues that for search and advertising companies it is major business.

Here are a few examples I ran into the past weeks:

1. Using Internet Exlorer at a friend's place I discovered that Microsoft is - understandably - plugging their Bing search engine as default in their Internet Explorer address bar. More and more people use their browser as search engine instead of going to a specific search engine homepage. Internet Explorer still has a huge market share, so do the math... One of Google's responses is a huge - for Google unprecedented - on and of-line marketing campaign for their own browser: Chrome.

2. When downloading Google's newest Picasa update, a menu appeared with a few pre-checked options. One of them was: "Set Google as default search engine in Internet Explorer". No evil huh? Duh...

3. When installing a free anti-spyware application, the following warning from Google emerged from my system tray:

So I pressed OK. Then yet another warning - this time from the other camp - appeared. What's going on here!?

4. And then the news broke that the idealistic Open Source guys from the Linux/Ubuntu camp had fallen for the big money. They announced changing the default search engine and home page bundled into Firefox  from Google to Yahoo. The switch is due to a new, and presumably more profitable, revenue sharing agreement with Yahoo, and will be implemented in the next official release. 

Probably to be continued......