Search Wars Heat Up, and it Seems Mozilla Brought a Hot Match

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.