Totally called this one:

I don't think it's an accident that this announcement comes far away enough from the next release for there to be time for Google to make them a better offer. Even if that doesn't happen in the next release, this may be Canonical's way of showing their hand.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1079909

A couple of years ago Ubuntu went to Google asking for a revenue sharing deal, Google refused, even though they had done it many times before. Search was going to be Ubuntu's primary income in the netbook space. At the time Google probably thought they owned search. Its amazing what a little competition will do.

I would love to see Firefox and Safari change their default search to Bing (I would still use Google). Who knows, Google might start getting serious about things like privacy.

I was wondering why they chose to switch to Yahoo in the first place. The answer is at [https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2010-Januar...]:

"I am pursuing this change because Canonical has negotiated a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo! and this revenue will help Canonical to provide developers and resources to continue the open development of Ubuntu and the Ubuntu Platform."

http://duckduckgo.com would have been a much better choice!

Now they just need to replace Firefox with Chrome as the default browser.

Let’s recap why they first changed from Google to Yahoo!: "factors such as user experience, user preferences", really? Since when did Yahoo had better user anything than Google?????

The page seems to give no real reason. I wonder what happened to transparency in open source.

It was ridiculous to ship Ubuntu with a default search engine that basically is or will be powered by windows when the superior alternative is powered by Linux, but I suppose the bluff worked.