That is your second off-list reply. Sorry, but I will take one point of this second off-list mail back to the mailing list.
Off-list you pointed out that we have good alternatives like duckduckgo, startpage and maybe others. In the past, when ixquick (now startpage) wasn't available, some distros replaced firefox's default by scroogle. However, while startpage and in the past scroogle could replace google in regards to search results, duckduckgo can't do this. 1. duckduckgo is a PITA for other languages, but English. 2. If you want to fix an issue with Linux, using google or something google based, IOW startpage, provides much, much, much better hits. Regarding censorship there are other search engines available, startpage and duckduckgo aren't what you want, if you care about everything. Not only privacy and security are important, some people care about e.g. censorship. However, assuming people just care about privacy and want to get hits provided by google, then they could use starpage, but need to accept a missing feature that is very important when doing web research. While typing, google recommends search terms. This is spying by typing, but OTOH also a very helpful feature. A Linux novice often doesn't know what search term to use, Google does help to fix issues, if a novice's Ubuntu install fails, by offering search terms. It's not just an idiotic auto-completionfeature, it's really helpful feature for the clueless. In short, Jane Doe wants Google, she anyway does use facebook, twitter and orders from amzon, she doesn't care what Richard Stallman thinks about Ubuntu spyware and she doesn't care if some software she installed phones home or not. Regards, Ralf -- Lubuntu-users mailing list Lubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/lubuntu-users
