I am sure that so many of you wondered why Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 had Google as a default search engine.

What you don’t know is how Mozilla Firefox engine is benefiting from this “Google Search” default search engine. When you make a search with firefox google search, you get a long url containing a client parameter “client=firefox-a”, and if you click on a sponsored result in your query results, Mozilla earns a commission. With this agreement, Mozilla has earned $53 million in 2005;

With this technique, in my view, Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 was setting Google search not for the love of Google, but to find out the amount they can make out of this search tool. You can notice in the generated URL the parameter “client=ie7″. But it did not seem that profitable to them as long as Microsoft has its own search engine Windows Live Search, previously called MSN Search. In the latest release of Internet Explorer 7, this default Google search was removed. I believe that it wouldn’t be smart enough to make profits from Google Search when they have the opportunities to empower their search engine and earn full profits from sponsored ads.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Internet Explorer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.