KDE should make it easy for the companies to change the Firefox search boxes and start pages so they could make extra revenue. Then bundle some advertising system inside the OS and we're looking at a better deal for the companies.

Uh, Google Custom Search.

So yes, Google does exactly that. You might have a point if it was the site owners themselves creating the search boxes, but Google offers large choice of tools to do exactly that.

Wikipedia comes up in almost every search query on Google. Chrome heavily inflates their numbers too.

Actually, many manufacturers pre-load Chrome now as Google pays them to. It's extra revenue for them, just like pre-loading Norton trial and so on.

On top of that Google also pays shareware and freeware authors to bundle Chrome in their installs, just like BonziBUDDY and all those other adware and spyware apps used to do.

Since neither StatCounter or Net Applications have access to every site on the internet, Chrome's preloading greatly increases their change of being picked up by either service. This inflates the numbers.

In that case it balances out because Google does exactly the same. If you search on their other services, then many of them send you to the search engine. Google also offers sites their own "custom search" things and widgets that can be used to search that specific site (which just sends the user to Google with site: parameter). Google actually does this far more than Bing.

Neither StatCounter or Net Applications have access to all the sites on the internet. How would they? Instead, they track data using their own analytics services and such that webmasters can use. By preloading every page on search results and when moving around the internet, Chrome greatly increases their changes of being picked up those statistics services.

On top of that it also directly inflates the usage amount as now there's 10x more hits than with other browsers.

It doesn't necessarily make it faster. It eats up lots of bandwidth. I'm on a poor connection and doing stuff like that slows down the whole internet.

It's also dubious that Google boasts their market share with these inflated numbers...

And what if one of the search results contain child porn or something else illegal? That's a nice way to get you to be suspect and your home raided.

Yep, it even says so in the summary. He doesn't get that there are more than one statistics services.

It seems that Net Applications tracks more accurately too, because they ignore Google's inflating tricks:
IE at 54%, Firefox at 20.20%, and Chrome at 18.85%

What are you talking about? It's not about coming pre-loaded and bundled with every piece of shareware and freeware software, it's about preloading links and web pages as user browses the internet..

It's not only Chrome - they try to inflate Google+ user count also, by counting every single Google service - including search engine and YouTube - as part of Google+. Then they boast user counts of like 100 million while the users have been nowhere near Google+ itself and it's perfectly clear there's not that kind of users. It's part of their marketing.