So all in all I don't doubt they could raise some money, but chances of success would be extremely slim.
I don't think that Mozilla has a BATNA to Bing/Google which is why the economics are so different in each round. It's entirely based on Google and Bing bidding against each other.
Thus, there's only such deals and donations. An investor would therefore need to donate, to support Mozilla.
2) Bid $300 million for Mozilla's search spot.
3) Raise $600 million, build search engine
4) Profit
(Yeah, in practice steps 2 and 3 would need to happen simultaneously)
99% of FF users would just switch to Google as soon as they install it. It's not like anybody has made a competent enough search engine yet...
I assume you can back that up somehow? Most evidence I've seen indicates that the majority of people don't change defaults.
It's not like anybody has made a competent enough search engine yet
There would be more if there was an easy way around the distribution problem. Becoming the default search engine in Firefox would sure help with that problem.
Then the evidence you've seen is wrong. If people "don't change defaults" how come they switched to FF in the first place, which is not the default browser on Windows, but is (or rather, was until it lost to Chrome) an extremely popular windows browser?
Maybe naive users don't change defaults, but those users are sticking with (duh) the default IE. Users that moved to FF are more likely to change defaults.
Also, they won't even have to change the default: they just navigate to google.com and search from there, instead of using the search in the toolbar with this unfamiliar "Bing" thing.
"""http://blekko.com/ http://duckduckgo.com/ (...) """
Note the use of the word: "competent". None has results that good that make people actually want to switch to it. (For example, DDG's main selling point is privacy).
The only example I agree with, Baidu was made from a similar algorithm to Google's and with a remarkably similar history (RankDex vs PageRank etc). And even that is mainly popular in China for national/cultural/political reasons, methinks.
(Btw, why do you quote like that? HN docs on formatting are here: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)
No, "my argument" was on the topic of the comment I specifically responded to.
You know, where you said that by getting the FF default search && making your own search engine, you'll "profit". To which I responded something akin to: "bollocks --even if you do that, FF users will just switch search engine back to Google".
It wasn't that hard to follow, check it again.
"""(Btw, why do you quote like that? HN docs on formatting are here: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)
Ever noticed how the "HN docs on formatting" say NOTHING about quoting?
"Italics", which you use, is not for quoting is for emphasis. Other people use your method, other people use ">", I use mine.
Pre Google people switched search engines all the time -as soon as a better one come along.
If Google or Bing hadn't paid enough then it would be pretty easy[1] to raise the money from random investors.
There are precedents for that - Lycos (I think? or Infoseek?) raised capital after buying a default slot on the original Netscape browser with money they didn't actually have.
[1] Not saying that building a web scale search engine is easy, exactly, but I am saying that the default search engine for ~25% of the world web browsers is a business a lot of investors would want to invest in.