This has come up a couple of times and I'd like to address it.
So one of the things that hinders the adoption/growth of search engines is muscle memory. Sometimes people type into their browser's address bar the address of a search engine, and then search, but more often than not they just click into the search box and start typing. If all the results are 'good enough' people don't bother to check who their search provider is, much less try others. You can manually change your search on Internet Explorer away from Bing to something else, you could manually change your search in Chrome from Google to something else, and you could change the default in the drop down box in Firefox to something other than Google. But if you don't know what you are missing, well you don't do that do you?
Now various sites which have bills to pay and no direct revenue stream, like download sites, offer a service to folks like Blekko which says "We can run an offer to our customers, which if they take us up on it you'll pay us for that." Just like Google gets paid by an advertiser if you click through their advertisement to the site and buy something, these services make your offer for you and then charge you if someone takes you up on it.
So that is pretty standard stuff, the down side is that this space has some pretty scammy operators. We have debated quite a bit about this internally. Our goal has always been to introduce people to Blekko who may not have heard about it (see above :-). However, we've also discovered that sometimes that policing these guys is a pain. They get paid if you install our toolbar (which gives you quick access to our search engine). We insist that they make it an option and clearly spell out how to continue on with your download or what not without choosing to install it, and we insist that the vendor of this software make it straightforward and easy to revert the install if folks aren't happy with it. So that leads to situations where lots of people download software and say 'no thanks' on the offer. Sometimes that annoys the site because they aren't getting paid and they "change things" so that it always installs whether you want it or not. When we find out about that we cut those people off. And if the toolbar doesn't uninstall we cut those folks off too. We had one vendor who gave us a 'final' release to QA where it worked easily and the actual release didn't. That really irritated us. Sadly there isn't the equivalent of the better business bureau for these folks, we discover them, add them to our list of bad actors and move on. We've put a number of changes in place to be better at managing the process and it may be that it ends up there are just too many scumbags in this space to make it a credible channel. Time will tell on that, in the meantime if you ever spot a site telling you that you must install a Blekko powered toolbar in order to proceed (which is to say its not completely obvious how to opt out) please report it so support@blekko.com and we'll fix it.
That's noble and all, but you know what, it's still a toolbar. If I see it in an installer it's still going to put a bad taste in my mouth. You know as well as I do that 95% of those installs are not intentional, or are manipulated. The kinds of users that install toolbars are not computer savvy, and when the computer says "you should install this thing", they're the ones to say "accept".
