[tor-talk] Google as default search engine revisited

[Eitan Adler]

Picking a random mail to reply to.

On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 1:50 PM, Maxim Kammerer <mk at dee.su> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 19:25, Andrew Lewman <andrew at torproject.org> wrote:
>> Also, the majority of users want google as their default engine due to the quality of search results.
>
> The majority of users of Tor Browser want privacy and anonymity — I
> think it makes better sense to focus on that, and not on preference
> statistics that are invented on the spot.

While Google does have less than ideal privacy practices they are
largely mitigated by the other anonymity preserving measures taken in
TBB. In fact the entire point of TBB is to prevent remote sites like
Google from being able to determine anything useful from the data
being sent.

There are two other reasons to prefer Google over other search engines:

- Google is better in many (most?) cases such that the majority of
people prefer using Google
- Every patch against Firefox is another thing to maintain. While it
may seem simple, this has non-trivial cost. Every time Firefox changes
you have to check each and every patch you have and potentially update
it.

I'm not saying that Google should remain the default search engine but
that to switch there should be a specific threat to mitigate and
switching should be the best solution to that threat.

-- 
Eitan Adler