5 ms·

Interestingly, there was now "Why?" section to this new note. I'm surprised that Ubuntu has enough of an installed base for Google to have made a counter-offer.

by aditya 17y ago

Interestingly, there was now "Why?" section to this new note. I'm surprised that Ubuntu has enough of an installed base for Google to have made a counter-offer. Also, isn't Bing powering Yahoo's search these days anyway?

sjs 17y ago
There are millions of people using Linux. A few percentage of desktop users worldwide is not an insignificant number.
Tuna-Fish 17y ago
Based on the amount of people downloading updates, Canonical recently guessed that there are about 12 million Ubuntu users worldwide.
- aditya 17y ago
  Right - and there's about 350 million Firefox users in all, so that 12 million is <5%, which is what made me wonder. Via: http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/01/21/firefox-3-6-release/ http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/01/21/firefox-3-6-release/
enjo 17y ago
http://anotherubuntu.blogspot.com/2010/04/ubuntu-claims-12-million-users-as-lucid.html http://anotherubuntu.blogspot.com/2010/04/ubuntu-claims-12-m... Ubuntu is claiming 12 million users. That's not incredibly big, but it's probably enough to make Google take notice.
- gcb 17y ago
  I guess it's more then that. They are aware that those few users influence exponentially more users.
  - niels_olson 17y ago
    I would concur. I certainly hand out a few CDs of every release to interested friends and colleagues. I happened across an anesthesiologist just yesterday playing tunes in the OR with his Hackintosh. Not Ubuntu, but I'm willing to bet he's tried that too. So I think the people who are starting to look seriously into alternative computing is on the rise and in a variety of sectors, not just male college geeks and their friends.
gcb 17y ago
> Also, isn't Bing powering Yahoo's search these days anyway? don't think just yet.
jayp 17y ago
no. by end of 2010 (tentative).
- danudey 17y ago
  I wish they'd hurry up, Yahoo's Slurp is the worst crawler I've seen. The other day it had 113 connections open to one of our sites. Jeff Atwood has also blocked them from StackOverflow because they were taking up a disproportionate amount of bandwidth and generally behaving like tools. I love flickr, but Yahoo Search needs to die.
  - eli 17y ago
    MSN is far worse. On several of my sites, it routinely requests URLs that are 1) blocked in robots.txt and 2) have been 404 for years

by aditya 17y ago

sjs 17y ago

There are millions of people using Linux. A few percentage of desktop users worldwide is not an insignificant number.

Tuna-Fish 17y ago

Based on the amount of people downloading updates, Canonical recently guessed that there are about 12 million Ubuntu users worldwide.

aditya 17y ago
Right - and there's about 350 million Firefox users in all, so that 12 million is <5%, which is what made me wonder. Via: http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/01/21/firefox-3-6-release/ http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/01/21/firefox-3-6-release/

enjo 17y ago

http://anotherubuntu.blogspot.com/2010/04/ubuntu-claims-12-million-users-as-lucid.html http://anotherubuntu.blogspot.com/2010/04/ubuntu-claims-12-m... Ubuntu is claiming 12 million users. That's not incredibly big, but it's probably enough to make Google take notice.

gcb 17y ago
I guess it's more then that. They are aware that those few users influence exponentially more users.
- niels_olson 17y ago
  I would concur. I certainly hand out a few CDs of every release to interested friends and colleagues. I happened across an anesthesiologist just yesterday playing tunes in the OR with his Hackintosh. Not Ubuntu, but I'm willing to bet he's tried that too. So I think the people who are starting to look seriously into alternative computing is on the rise and in a variety of sectors, not just male college geeks and their friends.

gcb 17y ago

> Also, isn't Bing powering Yahoo's search these days anyway? don't think just yet.

jayp 17y ago

no. by end of 2010 (tentative).

danudey 17y ago
I wish they'd hurry up, Yahoo's Slurp is the worst crawler I've seen. The other day it had 113 connections open to one of our sites. Jeff Atwood has also blocked them from StackOverflow because they were taking up a disproportionate amount of bandwidth and generally behaving like tools. I love flickr, but Yahoo Search needs to die.
- eli 17y ago
  MSN is far worse. On several of my sites, it routinely requests URLs that are 1) blocked in robots.txt and 2) have been 404 for years