You’re absolutely correct. To clarify, when I say Google has invested in Firefox, I don’t mean they’ve acquired an equity position in the organization.

They’ve “invested” in supporting the growth and development of Firefox. Significantly. And it’s been a great relationship (one of the best partnerships the internet has ever seen, I think) that’s been very beneficial to both of them.

Mozilla is wholly owned by the public benefit, non-profit Mozilla Foundation and there are no outside investors at all.

Google, along with several other search providers, pay Mozilla for search traffic. As our choice for default placement among the several search services offered (in most but not all of the Firefox language versions,) Google gets a majority of Firefox’s search traffic and in turn the bulk of Firefox’s revenue comes from Google. But that’s it. Google does not own or have any stake in Firefox or Firefox’s parent organizations.

- A

They do have some problems …

Their efforts to tweak the system continue to make it more difficult for the average internet marketer to see results, so you’re seeing a mass exodus into the dark side of SEO. And that’s mostly what populates their search results right now - either large companies that are hand-ranked or spam.

I think they forget that if they’re of little use to average marketers, those markerters will stop talking about Google. They’ll start talking about new players like Searchme.com instead.