6 ms·

Mozilla exec urges Firefox users ditch Google for Bing

47 points by barredo 17y ago

metatronscube 17y ago
Too bad I have already ditched Firefox for Chrome then. Now that plugins are developing nicely I don't think I will ever go back to FF.
InclinedPlane 17y ago
I have trouble reading just about any recent criticisms of Google from Mozilla as anything other than a crybaby's temper tantrum. It sounds like they are disappointed that Google acts as an independent company rather than merely a money train straight into Mozilla's coffers. It also sounds like they are more than a little upset that Google managed to put together arguably the best-in-class web-browser on the planet in a very short time frame just when they were getting comfortable with the idea that inevitably Firefox would be not only the best but also the most popular browser. It seems that the Mozilla corporation was quite satisfied in its leading position in the special olympics race that has typified web browser development (Netscape under AOL failed so hard they killed their own once dominant brand, Mozilla took years to achieve reasonable quality, Microsoft is still putting out versions of IE competitive to the browser market in about 1999, Opera is a permanent bit-player, and Apple loathes the idea of writing a decent version of any of its software products that runs on windows). Now that there's some honest to goodness competition (in speed, usability, robustness, standards compliance, cutting edge standards adoption, and security) it's nothing but whine, whine, whine. Dear Mozilla, stop whining, Firefox is an excellent browser, keep the effort going to make it even better and you won't have to worry about what big-bad-Google is doing because it won't matter.
- indiejade 17y ago
  I have trouble reading criticisms of Mozilla from just about every person who jumps on the "Google can do no wrong" bandwagon. There's a definite benefit to the user to have a separation of control over the data that various tech entities have on it. Firefox isn't selling anything; it is the only browser that truly allows users to decide what data websites gather from them as visitors. Google developed Chrome because, for some reason, they thought that there's just _not enough_ "Google Advertising" online already, and they wanted to make sure that people can't easily disable advertisements, tracking cookies, etc. I tried Chrome on Linux, and really . . . was not that impressed. Firefox revolutionized the "tabbed browsing" concept, and that's the main fancy feature of Chrome. In a way, Chrome kinda just stole all the great things about Firefox (things that have taken years to develop), put those things into a shiny blue curvy-cornered UI, and slapped the Google name on it.
  - DrJokepu 17y ago
    The second most popular extension in the Chrome Extension Gallery ( https://chrome.google.com/extensions/ https://chrome.google.com/extensions/ ) is an ad blocker. Reusing open source code from another open source project is not "stealing". This is very much in line with the spirit of open source.
    - lsb 17y ago
      Yes, Mark Pilgrim had an interesting blog post about that: Recently, someone did the unthinkable: they published their own version of Dive Into Python and got it listed on Amazon.com. This apparently caused a small firestorm within Apress, the exact details of which I am not privy to, but which (I am told) became a somewhat larger firestorm after the Apress executives realized they had no legal recourse, and asked my opinion on the matter. You see, the book is published under the GNU Free Documentation License, which explicitly gives anyone and everyone the right to publish it themselves. (I was about to write “gives third parties the right,” until I realized that there are no third parties because there are no second parties. That’s kind of the point.) http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point
    - encoderer 17y ago
      That adblocker doesn't work. There was a thread about this recently here, but it's very easily provable yourself. It uses CSS to hide the ad. Chrome doesn't expose the necessary hooks to do ad blocking the way FF does. The chrome ad blocker is easily circumvented.
  - InclinedPlane 17y ago
    I'm certainly not a Google fan-boy (read some of my other posts if you want to check, I'm very skeptical of google), but Chrome really is a great achievement and it's silly to disrespect what Google has done with Chrome considering the difficulties so many other development teams seem to be having with browsers. There's absolutely nothing wrong with stealing features from a competitor, that's how progress is made. Chrome is not some sort of anti-consumer "forced ad consumption" monstrosity that you seem to make it out to be. By every measure it very much seems to be an attempt by Google to raise the bar for web browsers. Key indicators of this being: they have leveraged existing open source software (webkit); have put a lot of effort into standards compliance, javascript performance (v8), and forward looking standards adoption (html5 and css 3 features, web sockets, etc.); a drastically open development process (even more so than firefox, with much easier access to dev builds); an incredibly fast development pace (Chrome is barely 1 year old); and have made the vast majority of their work open source with the Chromium project. To every indication they want to prove what can be done with browsers and very much hope other browsers copy them. If you look at Chrome and all you see is yet-another-tabbed-browser then I question whether or not Hacker News is the correct community for you to hang out in.
- DrJokepu 17y ago
  Firefox is not what it used to be. Remember the days when it was called Firebird and Phoenix? When it was actually a fast browser? Decisions at Mozilla now made with politics and not the user in mind. I'm hugely disappointed by Firefox's poor codec support for the HTML5 audio and video tags. This will make either the audio/video tags or Firefox irrelevant but there's one thing it won't achieve; making Ogg Vorbis and Theora popular. Seriously, what they're doing is pretty much an abuse of their market position. Firefox might be popular and mainstream now but if things don't change it will lose its relevancy really quickly. I think at this stage the best solution would be forking Firefox. Remember when they forked out Phoenix from Mozilla to create a lightweight and fast browser that offers features that users actually want? I think it's time to do it again.
  - IgorPartola 17y ago
    Any IT enterprise, whether a part of a larger entity or itself the entity, must strike a balance between what its clients demand and what it must do. Mozilla feels that it needs to push Ogg Vorbis and Theora into the mainstream, despite the fact that its clients could not give a rat's ass about that. They failed to write it directly into the standard so now they are using their market position for the questionable tactic. However, what they are doing is still better than what Microsoft had done when they were in Mozilla's position. Also, isn't FF3.5 faster now than it ever was, even as Firebird or Phoenix? As far as forking FF: good luck. The code is a bit of a mess and there's a huge amount of it. What organization will want to take this on? I think you would have better chances at cloning WebKit+V8.
  - halo 17y ago
    I've used Firefox since the very early days (Phoenix 0.3) and I can honestly say it could never be described as a "fast browser" - before Firefox I was using Opera which was much faster and much more lightweight. If anything, I would say Firefox is faster now than it used to be, but perhaps now the difference is it's easier to make an unfavourable comparison to the WebKit browsers which didn't exist back then. The audio/video tag situation is messy, but I hardly think solely blaming Mozilla for it is fair. Apple won't support Ogg because of submarine patent concerns (although I doubt them already having a license and having millions of devices with H.264 hardware support hurt) and Mozilla won't support H.264 due to known patent concerns. It's hardly the overdramatic "abuse of market position" that you make it out to be, especially given that their intentions are also somewhat altruistic. I also don't see what a Firefox fork would achieve. I doubt anyone is going to magically be able to make Firefox faster if Mozilla's full-time staff is unable to, and I doubt ignoring patents or doing messy hacks to integrate OS codec support is going to win widespread favour given the current position of the video/audio tag.
- bad_user 17y ago
  You are right ... they should improve Firefox to make it more popular. I'm using Chrome right now, and while I miss many features from Firefox ... OMFG, it's so nice to use a fast browser. But, one of the things I always hated about Microsoft is the way they compete with others that use their ecosystem of platforms and tools ... Mozilla is formed of ex-Netscape people and they remember quite well what that kind of competition can do. Netscape was a good browser, and indeed they waited 3 years before they released 6.0 ... but god dammit, how can you compete with a browser that's bundled with everyone's operating system, and for free too. When you have a parter that helps you bring in more revenue (like Mozilla) you try not to screw-up that relationship. If other competing browsers or Web/Web-enabled applications appear in the future, what will be their incentive to use Google's services ... if Google has a history of competing directly with you sooner or later? It's the same thing over and over again ... groundhog day?
  - InclinedPlane 17y ago
    It seems that every retelling of the great NS/MS browser war seems to be laden with historical revisionism. First, bundling the browser with the OS was absolutely the right thing to do, there's no greater indication of this than that every single modern operating system comes with a bundled web browser. MS may have been guilty of a lot of other anti-competitive activity, but decrying the bundling of the browser with the OS is just silly and naive. Second, people seem to misremember just how crappy Netscape was then. Netscape 4.x was a travesty, it was buggy, slow, and crash-prone. IE 4 really was a better browser at the time (honest). People complain about the problems of supporting IE6 today but supporting NS 4 was so much worse. Not only was it far less standards compliant than IE at the time (if you could imagine it) but simple things like using an external style sheet could cause the browser to crash reliably. We know now that much of these quality problems were due to AOL mismanagement and a completely unnecessary full rewrite of the browser core, nevertheless, such was the state of browsers at the time. Fortuitously, MS woke up to the importance of the web, started putting real effort into IE development, bundled the browser with the OS, and used a few other dirty tricks at just the right time when Netscape was floundering. IE dominated the market shortly thereafter, but such a dramatic change in marketshare was possible only because Netscape was not a serious competitor at the time. Netscape development continued to flounder until eventually they just gave up and decided, like SCO, to pursue their futures in court rather than in the marketplace. They gained a partial victory in court but it was utterly meaningless as they had lost to such an astronomical degree in the market they had no hope at that point. They dumped the mess of code they had on the open source community which spent several years working on it before it was even remotely worthwhile, and they ran, eventually completely killing their entire brand (an impressive achievement). Now we see, though, that quality browsers like FF, Chrome (and to a lesser extent Safari and Opera) can and do compete against a bundled browser like IE. IE is still losing marketshare while FF, Chrome, and others continue to build it, over time this will add up and IE may yet be dethroned in the near future despite all the purported insurmountable advantages of OS bundling. I suspect that these trends will only accelerate, as the tech-leaders of today shun IE as their personal browser and IE is very far behind in supporting not only the web standards of today (e.g. css 2) but the quickly approaching standards of tomorrow (css 3/html 5/ws/etc.) When you can make nice looking boxes with rounded corners and drop shadows that work for FF, Chrome, and Safari users with 5 seconds of work by adding 2 lines to a css definition then the cost/benefit differential for supporting different browsers starts to change dramatically, with IE very much not on the winning end of that equation.
- acg 17y ago
  It could also be paid work, being paid for having a particular opinion is great work if you can get it.
chaosmachine 17y ago
I never thought I'd see a Mozilla exec recommending a switch to Microsoft products. It's funny how fast things can change, and kind of scary that Microsoft is considered the best alternative.
barredo 17y ago
How long till Firefox has its own Firebird?
tlrobinson 17y ago
Um, does Mozilla have a similar revenue share deal with Bing as it does with Google Search? Because last I checked Mozilla gets nearly all of it's revenue from Google. If they have a better deal with Bing, then it's in Mozilla's interest to push users away from Google towards Bing anyway...
- tedmielczarek 17y ago
  No, there's not currently any sort of deal there. (Also I wouldn't exactly label Asa as a "Mozilla exec", but what do I know.)
Deestan 17y ago
Outright misleading, linkbait headline; it implies that he insists all Firefox users switch from Google to Bing. What he actually says is: "[...]if you care about your privacy, remember that Bing is better than Google, at least in that department."
- brown9-2 17y ago
  That's a quote from the article, it is not a direct quote from Asa Dotzler.
  - Deestan 17y ago
    You're right. In the blog post http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/12/if_you_have_nothing.html http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/12/if_you_h... all he says about the matter is: > And here's how you can easily switch Firefox's search from Google to Bing. (Yes, Bing does have a better privacy policy than Google.)
alecco 17y ago
What I don't get is why would Bing be better at privacy. I could understand if he recommended one of the new search engines (e.g. D. D. Go) with better privacy policies and less tracking cookies.
va_coder 17y ago
I try to use other search engines out of fear that Google will get too powerful. Unfortunately, when I need a deep dig search Google is often best.
TallGuyShort 17y ago
I'm sure this is more about the browser wars than it is about privacy.
jfager 17y ago
I don't get it. I just read both privacy policies, and they seem pretty much identical. Asa says in the comments that "Microsoft doesn't connect it to my name, my addressbook, my friends, my email address, my physical location, etc. Microsoft scrubs things like IP address immediately and stores the data for less time." But the Bing privacy policy specifically says that it does store IP addresses. The only reference to scrubbing IP addresses is that they do so when they hand off their search data to 3rd parties (um, thanks), or after 18 months (just as long as Google). The bit about not linking those searches to the rest of your account info is also specious - the privacy policy only says it stores search terms separate from information that 'directly identifies' a user, but it doesn't say or imply that IP addresses are considered direct identification, and it specifically says that it stores the cookie id associated with the search terms.

47 points by barredo 17y ago

Too bad I have already ditched Firefox for Chrome then. Now that plugins are developing nicely I don't think I will ever go back to FF.

InclinedPlane 17y ago

I have trouble reading just about any recent criticisms of Google from Mozilla as anything other than a crybaby's temper tantrum. It sounds like they are disappointed that Google acts as an independent company rather than merely a money train straight into Mozilla's coffers. It also sounds like they are more than a little upset that Google managed to put together arguably the best-in-class web-browser on the planet in a very short time frame just when they were getting comfortable with the idea that inevitably Firefox would be not only the best but also the most popular browser. It seems that the Mozilla corporation was quite satisfied in its leading position in the special olympics race that has typified web browser development (Netscape under AOL failed so hard they killed their own once dominant brand, Mozilla took years to achieve reasonable quality, Microsoft is still putting out versions of IE competitive to the browser market in about 1999, Opera is a permanent bit-player, and Apple loathes the idea of writing a decent version of any of its software products that runs on windows). Now that there's some honest to goodness competition (in speed, usability, robustness, standards compliance, cutting edge standards adoption, and security) it's nothing but whine, whine, whine. Dear Mozilla, stop whining, Firefox is an excellent browser, keep the effort going to make it even better and you won't have to worry about what big-bad-Google is doing because it won't matter.

indiejade 17y ago
I have trouble reading criticisms of Mozilla from just about every person who jumps on the "Google can do no wrong" bandwagon. There's a definite benefit to the user to have a separation of control over the data that various tech entities have on it. Firefox isn't selling anything; it is the only browser that truly allows users to decide what data websites gather from them as visitors. Google developed Chrome because, for some reason, they thought that there's just _not enough_ "Google Advertising" online already, and they wanted to make sure that people can't easily disable advertisements, tracking cookies, etc. I tried Chrome on Linux, and really . . . was not that impressed. Firefox revolutionized the "tabbed browsing" concept, and that's the main fancy feature of Chrome. In a way, Chrome kinda just stole all the great things about Firefox (things that have taken years to develop), put those things into a shiny blue curvy-cornered UI, and slapped the Google name on it.
- DrJokepu 17y ago
  The second most popular extension in the Chrome Extension Gallery ( https://chrome.google.com/extensions/ https://chrome.google.com/extensions/ ) is an ad blocker. Reusing open source code from another open source project is not "stealing". This is very much in line with the spirit of open source.
  - lsb 17y ago
    Yes, Mark Pilgrim had an interesting blog post about that: Recently, someone did the unthinkable: they published their own version of Dive Into Python and got it listed on Amazon.com. This apparently caused a small firestorm within Apress, the exact details of which I am not privy to, but which (I am told) became a somewhat larger firestorm after the Apress executives realized they had no legal recourse, and asked my opinion on the matter. You see, the book is published under the GNU Free Documentation License, which explicitly gives anyone and everyone the right to publish it themselves. (I was about to write “gives third parties the right,” until I realized that there are no third parties because there are no second parties. That’s kind of the point.) http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point
  - encoderer 17y ago
    That adblocker doesn't work. There was a thread about this recently here, but it's very easily provable yourself. It uses CSS to hide the ad. Chrome doesn't expose the necessary hooks to do ad blocking the way FF does. The chrome ad blocker is easily circumvented.
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  I'm certainly not a Google fan-boy (read some of my other posts if you want to check, I'm very skeptical of google), but Chrome really is a great achievement and it's silly to disrespect what Google has done with Chrome considering the difficulties so many other development teams seem to be having with browsers. There's absolutely nothing wrong with stealing features from a competitor, that's how progress is made. Chrome is not some sort of anti-consumer "forced ad consumption" monstrosity that you seem to make it out to be. By every measure it very much seems to be an attempt by Google to raise the bar for web browsers. Key indicators of this being: they have leveraged existing open source software (webkit); have put a lot of effort into standards compliance, javascript performance (v8), and forward looking standards adoption (html5 and css 3 features, web sockets, etc.); a drastically open development process (even more so than firefox, with much easier access to dev builds); an incredibly fast development pace (Chrome is barely 1 year old); and have made the vast majority of their work open source with the Chromium project. To every indication they want to prove what can be done with browsers and very much hope other browsers copy them. If you look at Chrome and all you see is yet-another-tabbed-browser then I question whether or not Hacker News is the correct community for you to hang out in.
DrJokepu 17y ago
Firefox is not what it used to be. Remember the days when it was called Firebird and Phoenix? When it was actually a fast browser? Decisions at Mozilla now made with politics and not the user in mind. I'm hugely disappointed by Firefox's poor codec support for the HTML5 audio and video tags. This will make either the audio/video tags or Firefox irrelevant but there's one thing it won't achieve; making Ogg Vorbis and Theora popular. Seriously, what they're doing is pretty much an abuse of their market position. Firefox might be popular and mainstream now but if things don't change it will lose its relevancy really quickly. I think at this stage the best solution would be forking Firefox. Remember when they forked out Phoenix from Mozilla to create a lightweight and fast browser that offers features that users actually want? I think it's time to do it again.
- IgorPartola 17y ago
  Any IT enterprise, whether a part of a larger entity or itself the entity, must strike a balance between what its clients demand and what it must do. Mozilla feels that it needs to push Ogg Vorbis and Theora into the mainstream, despite the fact that its clients could not give a rat's ass about that. They failed to write it directly into the standard so now they are using their market position for the questionable tactic. However, what they are doing is still better than what Microsoft had done when they were in Mozilla's position. Also, isn't FF3.5 faster now than it ever was, even as Firebird or Phoenix? As far as forking FF: good luck. The code is a bit of a mess and there's a huge amount of it. What organization will want to take this on? I think you would have better chances at cloning WebKit+V8.
- halo 17y ago
  I've used Firefox since the very early days (Phoenix 0.3) and I can honestly say it could never be described as a "fast browser" - before Firefox I was using Opera which was much faster and much more lightweight. If anything, I would say Firefox is faster now than it used to be, but perhaps now the difference is it's easier to make an unfavourable comparison to the WebKit browsers which didn't exist back then. The audio/video tag situation is messy, but I hardly think solely blaming Mozilla for it is fair. Apple won't support Ogg because of submarine patent concerns (although I doubt them already having a license and having millions of devices with H.264 hardware support hurt) and Mozilla won't support H.264 due to known patent concerns. It's hardly the overdramatic "abuse of market position" that you make it out to be, especially given that their intentions are also somewhat altruistic. I also don't see what a Firefox fork would achieve. I doubt anyone is going to magically be able to make Firefox faster if Mozilla's full-time staff is unable to, and I doubt ignoring patents or doing messy hacks to integrate OS codec support is going to win widespread favour given the current position of the video/audio tag.
bad_user 17y ago
You are right ... they should improve Firefox to make it more popular. I'm using Chrome right now, and while I miss many features from Firefox ... OMFG, it's so nice to use a fast browser. But, one of the things I always hated about Microsoft is the way they compete with others that use their ecosystem of platforms and tools ... Mozilla is formed of ex-Netscape people and they remember quite well what that kind of competition can do. Netscape was a good browser, and indeed they waited 3 years before they released 6.0 ... but god dammit, how can you compete with a browser that's bundled with everyone's operating system, and for free too. When you have a parter that helps you bring in more revenue (like Mozilla) you try not to screw-up that relationship. If other competing browsers or Web/Web-enabled applications appear in the future, what will be their incentive to use Google's services ... if Google has a history of competing directly with you sooner or later? It's the same thing over and over again ... groundhog day?
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  It seems that every retelling of the great NS/MS browser war seems to be laden with historical revisionism. First, bundling the browser with the OS was absolutely the right thing to do, there's no greater indication of this than that every single modern operating system comes with a bundled web browser. MS may have been guilty of a lot of other anti-competitive activity, but decrying the bundling of the browser with the OS is just silly and naive. Second, people seem to misremember just how crappy Netscape was then. Netscape 4.x was a travesty, it was buggy, slow, and crash-prone. IE 4 really was a better browser at the time (honest). People complain about the problems of supporting IE6 today but supporting NS 4 was so much worse. Not only was it far less standards compliant than IE at the time (if you could imagine it) but simple things like using an external style sheet could cause the browser to crash reliably. We know now that much of these quality problems were due to AOL mismanagement and a completely unnecessary full rewrite of the browser core, nevertheless, such was the state of browsers at the time. Fortuitously, MS woke up to the importance of the web, started putting real effort into IE development, bundled the browser with the OS, and used a few other dirty tricks at just the right time when Netscape was floundering. IE dominated the market shortly thereafter, but such a dramatic change in marketshare was possible only because Netscape was not a serious competitor at the time. Netscape development continued to flounder until eventually they just gave up and decided, like SCO, to pursue their futures in court rather than in the marketplace. They gained a partial victory in court but it was utterly meaningless as they had lost to such an astronomical degree in the market they had no hope at that point. They dumped the mess of code they had on the open source community which spent several years working on it before it was even remotely worthwhile, and they ran, eventually completely killing their entire brand (an impressive achievement). Now we see, though, that quality browsers like FF, Chrome (and to a lesser extent Safari and Opera) can and do compete against a bundled browser like IE. IE is still losing marketshare while FF, Chrome, and others continue to build it, over time this will add up and IE may yet be dethroned in the near future despite all the purported insurmountable advantages of OS bundling. I suspect that these trends will only accelerate, as the tech-leaders of today shun IE as their personal browser and IE is very far behind in supporting not only the web standards of today (e.g. css 2) but the quickly approaching standards of tomorrow (css 3/html 5/ws/etc.) When you can make nice looking boxes with rounded corners and drop shadows that work for FF, Chrome, and Safari users with 5 seconds of work by adding 2 lines to a css definition then the cost/benefit differential for supporting different browsers starts to change dramatically, with IE very much not on the winning end of that equation.
acg 17y ago
It could also be paid work, being paid for having a particular opinion is great work if you can get it.

chaosmachine 17y ago

I never thought I'd see a Mozilla exec recommending a switch to Microsoft products. It's funny how fast things can change, and kind of scary that Microsoft is considered the best alternative.

barredo 17y ago

How long till Firefox has its own Firebird?

tlrobinson 17y ago

Um, does Mozilla have a similar revenue share deal with Bing as it does with Google Search? Because last I checked Mozilla gets nearly all of it's revenue from Google. If they have a better deal with Bing, then it's in Mozilla's interest to push users away from Google towards Bing anyway...

tedmielczarek 17y ago
No, there's not currently any sort of deal there. (Also I wouldn't exactly label Asa as a "Mozilla exec", but what do I know.)

Deestan 17y ago

Outright misleading, linkbait headline; it implies that he insists all Firefox users switch from Google to Bing. What he actually says is: "[...]if you care about your privacy, remember that Bing is better than Google, at least in that department."

brown9-2 17y ago
That's a quote from the article, it is not a direct quote from Asa Dotzler.
- Deestan 17y ago
  You're right. In the blog post http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/12/if_you_have_nothing.html http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/12/if_you_h... all he says about the matter is: > And here's how you can easily switch Firefox's search from Google to Bing. (Yes, Bing does have a better privacy policy than Google.)

alecco 17y ago

What I don't get is why would Bing be better at privacy. I could understand if he recommended one of the new search engines (e.g. D. D. Go) with better privacy policies and less tracking cookies.

va_coder 17y ago

I try to use other search engines out of fear that Google will get too powerful. Unfortunately, when I need a deep dig search Google is often best.

TallGuyShort 17y ago

I'm sure this is more about the browser wars than it is about privacy.

jfager 17y ago

I don't get it. I just read both privacy policies, and they seem pretty much identical. Asa says in the comments that "Microsoft doesn't connect it to my name, my addressbook, my friends, my email address, my physical location, etc. Microsoft scrubs things like IP address immediately and stores the data for less time." But the Bing privacy policy specifically says that it does store IP addresses. The only reference to scrubbing IP addresses is that they do so when they hand off their search data to 3rd parties (um, thanks), or after 18 months (just as long as Google). The bit about not linking those searches to the rest of your account info is also specious - the privacy policy only says it stores search terms separate from information that 'directly identifies' a user, but it doesn't say or imply that IP addresses are considered direct identification, and it specifically says that it stores the cookie id associated with the search terms.