Microsoft’s new browser IE 8 is now in general release. There are loads of features, which I won’t go into at length. Danny did a preliminary overview of the search and ad-related features of IE8 already, which I’m sure he’ll revisit at some point. And the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg offers a generally favorable review, but has some complaints about speed.

The two things I’m going to discuss in this post are Microsoft’s “Live Search Accelerators” and Yahoo’s new “visual search shortcuts.”

Live Search Accelerators perform a range of functions, searches or lookups on, for example, a piece of text, a product name or address within a web page. You can also translate text into another language or send it to Facebook or Digg, among other options. To use the tired phrase: it’s like right click “on steroids.”

Users highlight the text and an Accelerator icon appears. That in turn opens a menu with various options with what to do with the passage or text (those options can be expanded with a range of add-ons). The benefit is that information or a search result appears in a window on the page so you don’t have to open a new tab or visit another site to get the desired information.

This is a great feature; however, I was having some difficulty getting it to work on my older PC laptop (probably a function of the laptop rather than IE8).

Here’s a list of all the current Accelerator add-ons. The mapping Accelerator, one of the most useful features in my mind, allows users to lookup addresses on Live Search Maps or Yahoo Maps right on the page you’re on. So if you want to see what neighborhood a particular hotel is located in, you can do that without going “over” to a mapping site. Conspicuously absent, however, are options to use Google Maps or MapQuest.

Hopefully those options will be added in the near term.

I’m sure that Microsoft sees this and other features of IE8 as a way to grow share in various categories and expose Live Search (or whatever it becomes) to more users. So there’s some tension between using this property to advance Microsoft’s specific interests and offering a service or toolset that is fully user centric. I’m sure the developers would argue the company is trying to do the latter.

The other development I wanted to discuss is Yahoo’s “visual search shortcuts.” This operates from the search box on the browser toolbar. Yahoo must first be selected as the search provider in the IE 8 search box (Live Search is the default). If you then enter a query you see search suggestions but also “shortcuts” for certain categories of information: stocks, movie showtimes, movie reviews and weather.

Here’s an example of what you get on a lookup for the stock quote for “Yhoo”:

Like Accelerators, this feature is also very helpful in quickly getting to desired information without opening new tabs or pages. Yahoo says that it will roll out more categories of shortcuts in the future.

There are no ads in visual shortcuts for IE8 however. If one were to perform the same searches on Yahoo proper there would be, or potentially be, sponsored listings that appeared with search results.

Google’s has released its own open-source browser, Chrome, in direct competition to Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Yesterday, Danny described his test-drive of Chrome in Searching With Google Chrome & Omnibox and Greg speculated on its future in How Bright Is The Outlook For Chrome?. Both compared Google’s new browser to the incumbents, Firefox and Internet Explorer. But Chrome is actually very different from those two browsers, and significantly different from nearly everything else on the market. Here are the 10 major features that truly differentiate Google Chrome from the competition:

1. It’s being built from the ground up. The Google engineers involved understood that modern day web browsing is about applications and rich media, which normal browsers are not built for, so they started from scratch.

2. Well, not entirely. Chrome is being built on WebKit, the basis of Apple’s Safari browser and the browser in the Google Android mobile platform, and using Google Gears, a web applications plug-in/platform.

3. To deal with the new types of demands users make of web browsers, Chrome will use multi-processing to handle all those demands, giving each element of a page (a JavaScript Command, a Flash video) its own memory and process, instead of the single-threading architecture used by today’s browsers. Multi-threading should make Chrome faster and more secure.

4. New tabs, above the address bar, will handle those different processes. So JavaScript threads will be in one tab and a video in another, allowing each to load simultaneously, reducing memory load, and ensuring that one bug in a page doesn’t crash the whole site (or whole browser), just that tab.

5. To make things even faster, Chrome will use a new JavaScript Virtual Machine from Denmark called V8.

6. Still not fast enough? Chrome’s Task Manager will function like Windows Task Manager, and allow you to find processes (even plug-ins) that are hogging resources or crashing, and just kill that process. No more closing tabs when the browser slows down; now you can go straight to the problem.

7. OK, faster? Chrome’s Omnibox can help. When you start typing in the address bar, Chrome offers suggestions to autocomplete your request–and not just based on your history and bookmarks like Firefox does, but also based on the most popular web sites as calculated by Google. You can even search a site from the address bar by typing a site name and hitting tab.

8. This one is on par with IE8 and the newest version of Firefox: a privacy mode, where you can browse without anything from the session being written to your computer–no cache, no history, no cookies, nothing. (Dubbed “porn mode” by most blogs, but with serious applications, such as public browsing, as well.)

9. Convenience is further advanced by a personalized home page with screenshots of the pages you visit most.

10. It’s extra secure; the browser includes Google’s ever-growing list of spyware and malware sites, and every tab is “sandboxed,” which means whatever happens in the tabs can’t affect your computer. (No more need to download Sandboxie). And no more pop-ups, not even JavaScript ones. Every pop-up is contained in the tab in starts in, collected as a small link on the bottom of the page. You can drag it off the page to see it, but it won’t pop up without your permission.

After finally getting the new Internet Explorer 8 beta installed (demands to upgrade Windows, verify Windows, sigh), I spent some time playing with the new search functionality and checking to see if Microsoft was going to try to stack the deck in its favor with the new browser. So far, it remains pretty even handed. Indeed, so far, Microsoft seems kind of lame given that there are some cool search features you’re hard pressed to locate. Let’s take a tour.

After installing the software, I’m asked if I want to use "Express Settings" or to make active choices:

Notice that Live Search is set to be my search provider if I go with Express Settings. This is good if whatever is already your default provider in IE7 is retained. In other words, if my default was Google, then I’m happy if Express Settings retains that. But I couldn’t tell this with my initial testing. That’s because in IE7, Live Search was my default provider already. It’s very, very bad if by "Express," IE8 simply changes things to be Live Search. I’ll try to test this more later.

Since I went for the "Choose my settings" option, I next got a screen like this, asking me to select a search provider:

As mentioned, In IE7, my default provider was Live Search already. This fact is highlighted for me, but I have to make a conscious choice to keep my default or select a different option. This is identical to how Internet Explorer 7 works. A screenshot from when IE7 first launched:

As I said when this behavior came in with IE7, I think asking people to make a choice is fine. Sure, Microsoft hopes they’ll change a few minds. But if your default choice was already Google, that’s not changed against your will. Indeed, the process is more open than Firefox, which does nothing to highlight the fact that a default provider has already been selected for you (see Hey Firefox - Let Us Pick Our Own Search Engine! for more about that).

I chose to select from a list of other providers, and then it seemed like nothing happened. Instead, I got more screens to configure other options, then I got a welcome page that appeared:

Look at the top. It took me some time to realize that way back when I said I wanted to choose a search provider, IE8 opened a tab (see the Add Search Provider one, second from the left) allowing me to pick from this page that has no particular favoritism.

I’d have preferred if this page was made more visible as part of the initial configuration. I mean, here I am deliberately watching for such an option, and I missed it. I’d assume many ordinary consumers would miss it as well.

What do the choices do for you? As with IE7, IE8 has a search box in the top right hand side of the browser:

The choices allow you to add more search engines to that box or change whatever is the default there:

After selecting Google and making it my default, the box changes:

So far, there’s nothing that dramatic or new. But I’d read in various places about how that search box was supposed to have some cool "visual" or thumbnail search options. Where were these? Nothing I went through at installation prompted me to add them, nor did any of the search settings within IE8 seem to point you at them.

In the end, it was via the official Internet Explorer blog where I found them. The post about IE8’s beta illustrated some of these Visual Search choices and linked to some from the New York Times and Amazon but oddly not to the main home page containing all of them.

If you want them all, find them here:

I can swear that when I originally looked, Google wasn’t one of the options. Maybe I missed it. Regardless, Google’s certainly there now. And while Yahoo is featured in that screenshot, the option rotates — Wikipedia appeared when I later looked.

If you add one of these and already have the "non-visual" version in your toolbar, you’ll get a choice to either replace that with the new one or have both.

What’s supposed to happen is that when you have some of these options, they’ll preload results as you type. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get this feature to work — not even with the exact same search providers and search terms illustrated in the IE8 blog post.

Somewhat related to search is the "InPrivate" blocking feature which is designed to limit or prevent sites from tracking you across the web. Somewhat related because there have been some reports that with this feature enabled, ads are blocked on sites – and some of those could be Google AdSense ads.

I can’t confirm any of this because as far as I can tell, InPrivate isn’t enabled by default in my version of IE8 nor is there anyway to enable it, that I can tell. The IE8 blog talks about the feature, but heck if I can get it going. When and if I can, I’ll look at the blocking in more detail.

In general, as a site publisher, I’d prefer that a browser does not block ads by default. Ads are a major way that we and other sites pay for the content we publish freely online. Some might also see any default ad blocking as a way for Microsoft to somehow take a swing at Google through its browser. If so, then Microsoft would be swinging against itself, too – since it has major online ad aspirations.

My expectation would be that ad blocking is not a default option and that in the case of cross-site scripting protection, we might see the ability for trusted sites to be excluded from blocking (if that’s not already in there).

For more on today’s release, see here on Techmeme — and News.com had a nice summary of key features, I thought.

Postscript: I did a reinstallation of IE8, and now I can see some of the features that were missing above.

In order to enable the InPrivate Blocking of ads, you first have to enable InPrivate Browsing (from the menu bar, select Tools, then InPrivate Browsing). Only after that can you turn on ad blocking (from the menu bar, select Tools, then InPrivate Blocking).

I found a number of reassuring things. For one, starting up InPrivate Browsing opens up an entire new window. Not only is it NOT ON by default but it’s also more of a "special use" behavior. Then, the actual third party site blocking within the new window also has to be enabled. That’s two steps to jump through in order to block ads or other third party content.

I surfed to probably 30 or so different sites, with more than 10 of them carrying AdSense, and didn’t find that any AdSense units were blocked. Heck, I didn’t see if any ads were blocked. I can’t tell if other third party scripts such as Google Analytics or Quantcast were blocked, however.

In general, I don’t see too much to worry about that the blocking will wipe out internet advertising or valuable tracking services, not as implemented. Instead, the tools require several hoops to jump through but for those who want an added level of privacy, they can get it.

I would like to see the tools show you everything that’s blocked, however. There’s supposed to be visual representation of content that’s removed on pages, but tracking services like Google Analytics have no visual cues that would get replaced. Nothing within the InPrivate settings window seems to provide this type of display.

For more about how the two services work, see these two posts from Microsoft:

• IE8 and Privacy
• Privacy Beyond Blocking Cookies: Bringing Awareness to Third-Party Content

As for visual search, well, I still can’t get that to work as described.

So Firefox 3 has a new release candidate making news, suggesting that the browser is nearly done. May I suggest that the browser is nowhere near being done until the Mozilla Foundation drops its favoritism to Google and allow users to pick their own default search engine? And that Microsoft ought to be among those choices?

Seriously, the entire Firefox+Google love fest is a joke. Let’s revisit a little history here. Google fought and fought to pressure Microsoft so that no search provider was the default in Internet Explorer 7, arguing this was the best for consumer choice:

"The market favors open choice for search, and companies should compete for users based on the quality of their search services," said Marissa Mayer, the vice president for search products at Google. "We don’t think it’s right for Microsoft to just set the default to MSN. We believe users should choose."

Google got what it wanted. Internet Explorer has no default search engine. If you upgraded to it, IE used whatever search choice was already established on your computer. If you did a fresh install of XP or Vista, then you had to choose your search provider. The choice was only made for you in cases where the computer maker itself cut a deal (see these here).

If Google’s all for choice, as I’ve said before, then Google should be pressuring Firefox to ensure there’s consumer choice in that browser, as well.

Instead, Google’s been quite happy to buy out the idea of consumer choice. As the New York Times pointed out toward the end of last year, 85 percent of Mozilla’s revenue comes from Google. In return for that, Google’s what you get as your search provider for most versions of Firefox.

Let’s talk specifics. If you download a fresh copy of Firefox, by default it will be Google search that you’ll use if you search using Firefox’s built-in search box. Using a drop-down option (as shown in the screenshot at the top of this article), you can then access these resources:

• Google (default)
• Yahoo
• Amazon
• Answers.com
• Creative Commons
• eBay
• Wikipedia (in Firefox 3, not Firefox 2)

It makes sense for Google to be among the options. It’s the world’s most popular search engine, well used and well respected. Similarly, Yahoo is an excellent Google alternative that should be included. And similarly, Microsoft Live Search is an excellent alternative — but it doesn’t make the list.

Why not? Again, Google has the deal to be the default search provider in most markets where Firefox is distributed, except for in some Asian markets, where Yahoo has a similar deal. It’s not clear if such deals also prevent Microsoft from being listed at all or if this happens because of the Firefox-Internet Explorer rivalry.

I don’t care in either case — Microsoft is a good search engine that searchers should have access to directly from that search bar. By not offering it, Firefox is failing its users out of either financial reasons or spite.

Yes, there’s an option to add other search engines. At the end of the drop-down box, there’s a Manage Search Engines choice that eventually leads you to this page. There, you can find Live Search among the other 23 choices. But as there aren’t that many choices, why not add them all to the search box? Firefox could learn a lesson here from Groowe. My long-time browsing companion, it lets me search from any of the major search engines or specialty search engines, with them easily grouped into categories.

Let’s go back to those other search choices. If you can’t include them all, why not list the more popular ones? Do that many people do Creative Commons searches that it needs to be right in the search box itself? And is Amazon there only because Firefox probably earns off of affiliate searches? Is that the same for eBay? If you go by download popularity, the choices would look more like this:

• Ask.com
• Google
• Live Search
• Yahoo
• Answers.com
• Flickr
• Creative Commons
• Merriam-Webster
• IMDB
• Wikipedia
• Weather Channel
• Amazon
• eBay

I submit that search is an important part of the browser development process that shouldn’t be left as a choice made based on how much money Mozilla can earn. It should be done in a way that best benefits the user. That means:

• Let the user make the initial search choice
• Provide a variety of search tools right within the box

Fix it, Firefox. And Google, help them fix it by ensuring that any provisions of the secret contract between you and Firefox are altered to allow for the consumer choice you’re so happy to espouse should happen in Internet Explorer.

Microsoft has experimentally introduced “SearchTogether,” which allows people to use a browser plug-in (IE7 only) to literally collaborate on search. You need a Windows Live ID and Messenger, but you can apparently use any search engine you like.

Here’s a tutorial and some screens.

I haven’t used it so I can’t report on the experience. Conceptually, however, I could imagine that in many use cases (e.g., Travel and Local Search) this could be highly valuable as an option. Microsoft Messenger has had collaboration capabilities around local search and Live Maps for some time, but they’re little used.

Indeed, collaboration is widely available in various online applications; however, it has yet to come to search. The key to mainstreaming this or gaining decent consumer adoption is bundling the option into the browser and not having several “hoops” for users to jump through.

This is very early and will undoubtedly evolve.

Will Success, or All That Money From Google, Spoil Firefox? from the New York Times asks if all the money Google is feeding Firefox going to hurt the browser and the community behind the browser in the future, by aligning the browser too closely with Google and its war against Microsoft.

Of the $66 million in revenue reported by Mozilla, 85 percent of that came from Google. But Mozilla said they made sure Google “understood the separation between a search relationship and the rest of our activities.” That may suggest that Mozilla is aware of why Google may want them to overtake Microsoft’s claim over the browser market.

See Google: As Open As It Wants To Be (i.e., When It’s Convenient) for some links and background on Google’s deal to be the default in Firefox in most countries (in several Asia countries, it’s Yahoo).

Last year, Google signed a landmark deal to become the default search engine on new Dell computers, plus to bundle Google software. Now, people are noting anew that a consequence of the deal seems to be pushing Dell users to search results dominated by Google ads, rather than editorial listings.

Google’s Browser Address Error Redirector from Google Operating System and Google turns the page… in a bad way from the OpenDNS Blog cover the same issue, a "feature" called "Browser Address Error Redirector" that sends those using Dell computers and trying to reach non-existent web sites to a page loaded with ads.

This has actually been going on for nearly a year now. Interesting Consequence of Google<->Dell Deal? from Dare Obasanjo shows an earlier version of it from last year. However, I get the impression the interface may have changed and more people encountering it now.

Here’s an example of what’s happening. Let’s say you tried to reach Microsoft but failed to add the .com to the address in your browser on a new Dell computer, so that you just entered [http://microsoft]. That error would get you redirected to this page:

On my 20" monitor, the top of the screen is filled with ads, so that it looks like this:

It’s not exactly the most helpful information for someone trying to reach a pretty easy-to-identify site. Rather than provide a link to Microsoft, the Google-Dell redirection lists a bunch of ads. Indeed, many more ads at the top (since Dell doesn’t show them at the side, like Google) than if you were to do the same search at Google.

Look at this side-by-side comparison of Dell’s Google-powered results versus Google itself:

I think the better quality of the results is self-evident. Google’s results put editorial links above the fold, with a direct link to Microsoft itself the first thing on the page — as it should be.

Personally, I don’t find the ads dominating this URL error page as bad as other things Google and Dell shove onto it. In particular, look at these sections. One from the side is called Popular Categories:

And at the bottom, Popular Results:

Really? I tried to reach a non-existent site and Dell and Google have somehow come up with Popular Categories and Popular Results related to this? And somehow, things like "car rental" and "payday loans" are among the contextually relevant choices?

In reality, these Popular Categories and Popular Results seem to have little to do with the popularity of URL error activity, as they would seem to imply. Instead, the seem suspiciously like a way to get Dell searchers to perform new queries that in response bring up ad-heavy pages that generate revenue for Dell and Google.

Let me be clear. These suggestion links themselves are not paid. Actual paid links within the Dell results are flagged as "Sponsored Links," in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines on labeling. But then again, there’s an excellent case to make that though the suggestion links themselves aren’t sponsored, they are misleading in suggesting they are somehow "popular" rather than hard-coded, hand-picked choices designed to generate ad views. That’s especially the case when a search for djfdkjkjdk brings up "Popular Results" that are the same as you’d seen in the search for Microsoft above. Clearly, these are hard-coded.

Google’s Matt Cutts, in his push against those selling paid links, recently reminded people of FTC disclosure guidelines, quoting the FTC from a Washington Post article:

“The petition to us did raise a question about compliance with the FTC act,” said Mary K. Engle, FTC associate director for advertising practices. “We wanted to make clear . . . if you’re being paid, you should disclose that.”

Well, Dell seems to be inserting these links, with the cooperation of Google, for the purposes of getting paid. Shouldn’t that be disclosed?

The error page does have a What’s This link at the top to explain more about it.

This page was generated because of one of these two reasons:

• The web address you typed did not resolve correctly.
   
• You typed a keyword query in the browser address bar.

  This page is meant to provide you with helpful related content, including web search results and paid advertisements, based on the meaning of the web address/keyword query that you typed. This program can be uninstalled from the Control Panel "Add/Remove Programs" in Windows XP or "Control Panel > Program > Programs and Features" in Windows Vista. Look for the application named "Browser Address Error Redirector". Older versions may be called "GoogleAFE".

The editorial results and even the paid ads can be considered helpful content, though obviously not as helpful as they could be. The Popular Results and Popular Categories units, let’s be honest, aren’t meant to provide any helpful related content at all.

The OpenDNS article on this issue also focuses on the software application that sends people to this page, if they enter non-working URLs, and suggests it’s spyware:

This page isn’t being shown to Dell owners just because they have the Google Toolbar. In fact, uninstalling the Google Toolbar won’t get rid of it. Dell and Google are now installing a second program on computers that intercepts all sorts of queries that the browser would normally try to resolve. This program has no clear name and is very hard to uninstall. In some circles, people would call this spyware.

I wouldn’t consider it spyware, but it certainly isn’t friendlyware. But you can understand why some people would think it’s spyware, when their computers seem to be acting in a strange way. Some searches brought up plenty of people who are confused by the software and what it is doing.

One of the most ironic things in all this is to compare what’s happening to the statements Dell and Google have made about consumer choice in the past. When the deal came out in May 2006, Dell said:

Our motivation is to deliver customers tools that enable them to search and organize information quickly and easily, right out of the box…Dell customers will have the option of choosing Microsoft as their default if they prefer.

I commented then

Yep — they just have to change the defaults in IE7, right? Except Google’s argued that those defaults are too hard for mere mortals to alter. So consumers really have as much choice with the Dell deal as they have with IE7 – that is, as much or as little choice as you think they are technically capable of.

Defaults and choice are important, because Google led a loud charge last year against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 as somehow making it too difficult for mere mortals to change to another search provider from its default settings. The company even raised the issue with US and EU authorities:

Google has informed the European antitrust authorities of its worry that "Microsoft’s approach to setting search defaults in Internet Explorer 7 benefits Microsoft while taking away choice from users," said Steve Langdon, a spokesman for Google.

Google would not say specifically what it has discussed with American antitrust officials. "We have spoken to the Justice Department generally about our business and the importance of preserving competition in the search market," Mr. Langdon said.

However, despite choice, Google’s been happy to control the default settings through deals with Firefox, Dell, Adobe and others. The hypocrisy prompted me to write back in May:

Sure, I can get behind the "give people a choice from the beginning" idea. But if Google wants Microsoft to do that, then Google should make it happen right now in Firefox, which pretty much is Google’s surrogate browser. If this is the best way for a browser to behave, then Google should be putting its weight on Firefox to make it happen. And Google should also ensure it does the same with Dell, where it has a partnership that I believe makes it the default search engine on new Dell computers.

I was far from the only one raising this. Nearly a year later, those using Dell’s don’t appear to have gained any greater choice, while arguably, their search experience has gone down.

Today I noticed Live.com trying to get me to search with it in Firefox. Then Yahoo did the same thing. So I guess a new round of "let’s change search defaults" is going on within Firefox. That seemed a good excuse for a revisit how the various search engines are trying to pull us as their default choices in both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox.

Back in October, I did a big fat article looking at the state of how search worked in Internet Explorer 7 and how search providers were trying to suck you into making them your default search choice. It was Firefox stuff that got me going today, but I wanted to first start by reviewing the IE7 situation.

For whatever reason, Internet Explorer 7 today acted like it was just installed on my desktop computer. Perhaps this was the result of the latest security patch that was pushed out. Maybe it was the result of me having removed the Google Toolbar since I first installed it. Frankly, it’s weird and has me slightly wondering if security updates will be used as an excuse to reset our defaults.

I’m especially paranoid because I don’t remember making MSN Search my default in IE7, yet that’s what it told me today in the "choose a provider screen" below:

Then again, my laptop did NOT try to get me to reset anything, and it shows the same IE7 version as my desktop. I had both the Google Toolbar and Yahoo Toolbar installed on my laptop. I removed them both, relaunched and my original default of Google stayed the same. So perhaps I am just paranoid or forget some change I made on my desktop.

With IE7 running and set to use Live.com (well, it says MSN Search), it was time for a tour of other major search engines, to see how they reacted.

Google saw I was using IE7 without using the Google Toolbar, so displayed this message:

Of course, the advantage to me downloading the Google Toolbar is that it will helpfully suggest that I switching to Google as my default search provider plus monitor to ensure it’s hard for other companies to switch me away from them.

Over at Yahoo, I got nothing. No pitch, no invitation to download a toolbar or change my defaults, nada. That’s exactly how Yahoo acted back when IE7 launched, and it’s incredibly strange. I’m both pleased they aren’t pushing to become my default and also thinking they’re missing out on what everyone else is doing.

FYI, Marketing Pilgrim had a big saga on Friday where Yahoo was accused of changing defaults without permission when people downloaded Yahoo Messenger. But then it seems Yahoo does explain what’s going to happen. You can read the back-and-forth there. Typically I’ve found things from all the providers are disclosed but that disclosures are often not easy to notice.

Over at Ask, I got a pitch to add Ask as my default:

See the invitation at the top of the screen? That "slides down" when you load the Ask.com home page. Ask has been doing this since the IE7 launch, as I wrote about earlier, but this is a different display than what it did at that time, which was this:

Now back to Firefox. When I went to Live.com today, I got this screen:

See the "Would you like to set Live Search as your default search provider" at the top of the page? I’ve never seen that before. Searching on the exact phrase via Google, I found only one match for it, over here at BufferOverrun. That shows it happening for a Mac user back in December. Maybe it’s been going on for both Mac and Windows users since then. But I’m regularly at Live.com, and this was a new thing for me.

If you click on it, Live.com will be added to the choices from the drop down list with a message like this:

Notice the "Start using it right away" check box. I like and dislike this.

I like that it’s not automatically checked. I dislike that if you do check it, Live.com apparently becomes your default. That’s a different thing than "Start using it right away." C’mon — plain speaking please! Make that option "Make Live.com My Default In Firefox," if that’s indeed the change that happens.

Of course, Live.com wouldn’t have to do some of this if it were at least already one of the default choices in Firefox, as it should be. From what I wrote about this last month:

Two of the most important search engines on the web — Ask.com and Live.com – are not defaults in [the Firefox] search box. Where’s the trust there? Google gets to be default because they pay Firefox money. Shouldn’t Firefox have undertaken a survey of search quality and given us a default that provides the best results? Shouldn’t those other two be there given they provide very good results as well, sometimes better than Google’s results?

That brings me back to Yahoo. Today I noticed this suggestion for the first time:

I didn’t find any other matches for the phrase "search with Yahoo! from your browser," so this also seems new. Also interesting that Yahoo’s not trying to make you change it to the default. It’s being low-key and simply reminding that it is a choice in Firefox to try.

A new survey from McAfee finds that AOL has the "safest" search results in terms of not listing sites that might be somehow be risky or unsafe for searchers. But most interesting to me was the fact paid results across the board were found far riskier than free, organic results. Let’s do the numbers, some summary plus tools that will help protect you and how to see if Google thinks you’ve been naughty.

In terms of unsafe results, most of the major search engines are pretty clean. McAfee ran 2,500 queries, looked to five pages deep, then assessed the "safety" of the sites that came up.

The overall risk breakdown:

• Yahoo: 5.1%
• MSN: 4.6%
• Ask: 4.2%
• Google: 4.2%
• AOL: 3.6%
• Average: 4.4%

Overall, it’s not bad. The vast majority of results are perfectly safe, a pretty good job given the automated nature of these tools. The figures above include both "red" dangerous sites (such as giving out adware, sending you spam if you give an email address) and "yellow" sites that may deserve caution (pop-up ads, try to change your browser settings).

Here’s the breakdown of percentage of red sites in the results:

• Yahoo: 3.1%
• Google: 2.7%
• Ask: 2.6%
• MSN: 2.5%
• AOL: 2.3%
• Average: 2.6%

The report notes that things have gotten slightly better overall, plus gives Google some praise for recent interstitial pages that come up if you try to click from Google to a site they think might be dangerous, something they rolled out in August. However, these only appear in 18 percent of the cases where McAfee thinks they should.

The report also looked at the safety of results from a paid and non-paid perspective:

• Organic: 3.0%
• Paid: 8.0%

It’s a huge difference, and one that’s especially worrisome given that the paid results are supposed to be human reviewed at some point. If anything, you’d expect the paid results to have a lower percentage of unsafe results than the organic ones, given this review.

In terms of paid results safety by search engine, it breaks down like this:

• MSN: 10.7%
• AOL: 8.1%
• Yahoo: 8.0%
• Google: 7.3%
• Ask: 6.5%

What are some of these dangerous sites? The report notes things like:

• charging fees for things normally free to download
• green card lotteries
• disguised pyramid schemes

There’s also a drill down on the issue of "free" offers that turnout not to really be free. The report’s author, Ben Edelman, in particular hates this practice. Ben and I have exchanged email on this issue a couple of times, and I hope the report does help focus attention to curb some of these practices in terms of sponsored results, which should be easier to police.

When I read that the report went five pages deep into results, I thought that was overkill. The first page or two seemed enough, and going deeper could possibly skew the results a bit to being more "unsafe." Most people never make it past the first or second page of results, so any unsafe results from pages three and beyond are largely invisible.

The report addresses this. On average, each page of results generally has about the same percentage of unsafe listings (4.3 to 4.5 percent). Ranking position is also covered. In general, a top ranked site isn’t any more or less safer than a site in position 10. Sponsored results show more difference, especially for ads that have the number one position across the top or on the right hand side of the page. These are generally much safer.

There’s much more. Check out the report, plus see related coverage from InformationWeek. In terms of protecting yourself, some tools you might try:

• McAfee SiteAdvisor: Surprise – the people with the report warning you about unsafe search results also have a tool to protect you. But it’s probably a good one, so check it out.
   
• TrustWatch: Support to put warnings into your search results whether you use Firefox or Internet Explorer. You can also search the web directly at the service.
   
• Scandoo: Web-based service offering to flag and filter dangerous sites. Also offers browser plug-ins.
   
• Firefox 2.0: Latest version of Firefox has warnings built in.
   
• Internet Explorer 7: Latest version of Internet Explorer has warnings built in.
   
• Google Toolbar For Firefox: Has safe browsing built in.
   
• Google Safe Browsing For Firefox: Running Firefox below 2.0? This plug-in from Google gives you warnings as you surf.
   
• Yahoo Toolbar: Has anti-spyware and anti-adware features.
   
• Windows Live Toolbar: Has anti-phishing built in.
   
• MSN Search Toolbar: If you’re still running the MSN Search Toolbar, there’s an anti-phishing add-on you can get.

FYI, Google Webmaster Central recently rolled out new support to help site owners know if they are bad, bad, bad. Check out the information here on how to monitor this in the tools they provide and how to appeal, if you think you’ve been unfairly nabbed.

Google Blatantly Copies Yahoo!? from Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny makes a pretty damning case against Google for blatantly ripping off Yahoo’s Internet Explorer 7 promo copy. Yahoo offers a custom version of IE7 via a pitch page you’ll see here. Google appears to have launched its own pitch page yesterday, one that was amazingly similar in look and feel to Yahoo’s.

Jeremy has the side-by-side photos of how the pages looked. Google’s page has since changed. In many places, the copy was either identical or the word Yahoo was simply swapped for Google.

At best, I thought perhaps Google was using some type of template page that Microsoft was encouraging cobranded partners to use. Jeremy says that’s not the case.

Google’s Matt Cutts weighs in with his own post on the topic, damage control by pointing out how Yahoo has copied Google’s ad style, Yahoo ads evolving to match what Google’s showing currently.

True. And Yahoo can easily point out that Google decided that paid ads made sense after imitating GoTo (which Yahoo later bought), plus that Google got real success with ads by moving to a CPC cost format rather than the CPM that they started with.

If I had time and desire, I’d sit here all day pointing out similar things that Google has copied from others, that Yahoo has copied from others, that Microsoft has copied from others, that Ask has copied from others. There’s no end of finger pointing that can be done.

I will say that I find a difference between mimicking user interfaces and simply flat-out copying a landing page. If a particular user interface or standard has evolved into a standard, I can generally back the idea that the industry moves to that, regardless of who pioneered it. But just taking a page and doing a search-and-replace? I cut less slack on that.

There’s no end of discussion sparked by the pages. To get a good roundup, see here on Techmeme for those talking about Jeremy’s story and here for those discussing Matt’s.