Default Search Change

Matthew East mdke at ubuntu.com
Tue Jan 26 21:58:22 GMT 2010


On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 6:31 PM, Rick Spencer
<rick.spencer at canonical.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-01-26 at 10:11 -0700, Mike Basinger wrote:
>
>> I did a unscientific test last night on commonly asked Ubuntu
>> questions (How to install Nvidia card, sound problems in Ubuntu,
>> Broadcom card in Ubuntu, etc...). Yahoo and Google put up similar
>> results, with most of the same pages listed on the first page of
>> search but in slightly different order. On Yahoo tech support answers
>> from blogs seemed to be ranked higher than official support channels
>> (help.ubuntu.com, wiki, forums). On Google, official Ubuntu source
>> rank slightly higher than blogs, with the forum ranking the highest
>> (which can be hit or miss on good tech support). This was only one
>> person doing five search, not enough to be a good sample of data.
>>
> Personally, I find the only difference is when I am searching for
> specific code samples. In those cases Google seems to do better.
> Otherwise, it seems exactly the same.

Although individual impressions are useful to a point, I would say
that the announcement would benefit from a statement that some kind of
organised and comprehensive testing has been done on the user
experience that is affected by this change, and that the user
experience or desktop team has signed off on the change as beneficial
to our users.

Otherwise people will just say that the change has been made without
regard to this factor for economic gain only.

(Any yes, I appreciate that Canonical making more money is an indirect
benefit to our users' experience, but that is quite subtle and
arguably not a proper consideration for decisions about Ubuntu as a
product, so I think it's important that this point is addressed at
least to preempt inevitable complaints.)

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF




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