Monday, April 1, 2013

Not so Chavez



So the powers that be at Google decided to just flip off millions of Christian users on the eve of their most important religious holiday and put a thug as the fist thing they see on Easter? Angry about that and not sure what to do about it?

Here's what i'm doing. Since I am slow to make any changes, i'll admit that I haven't really given Bing a try, especially since it has matured. So this finger in my eye gave me sufficient motivation to change my home page from Google to Bing. In Chrome it's really not that hard. There are three places to do this. First you select the options menu in the top right corner, then select 'Settings'. Scroll down to the "Appearance' heading, and where it says 'Show Home Button', click the 'change' button and put in 'www.bing.com'. The other place to change is the 'On Startup' heading, where it says 'open a specific page or set of pages' and select 'change', delete the default page that is there and again replace it with bing. Finally, by the 'Search' heading, select the pull down and pick 'Bing' as the search engine. This way when you type a query on the address or 'omni' box, it will go to Bing.

I'll see how that works for a while. Yes, I switched from Firefox to Chrome a while back, and enjoy the speed increase I got from that, but I will probably not change web browsers for now. I will start looking for alternatives and note what I find here. I obviously am using blogger, but I will be looking for some alternatives for that too, though the chore of moving all this content is daunting.

The second thing I did was to thank Google for giving me the motivation to change. It takes a bit of searching to find someplace where you can send feedback to Google as the don't really have a consumer complaint email. They do however have this place where you can give feedback on their web search tool. My guess is they are about to receive an unprecedented amount of feedback. Here's what I sent:
This seems the only place to send you feedback about your web search page, so here you go. I have to thank you for putting the Chavez link on your default search page. That obvious and offensive slur to Christians on our most important holy day gave me the motivation to try Bing as my default search engine. Thank You
Update:
The offending Google Doodle which triggered all this can be seen here. To paraphrase Ed Driscoll - they're 'special'. Thanks Rodger for pointing out the need for this reference.

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