Safari for Windows -- follow the money

Scot Hacker at O'Reilly Network thinks the real reason for Safari's port to Windows is because of the search bar. Since the searches generally go through Google, Apple gets a cut of the ad revenue generated by those queries.

O'Reilly's Hacker cites John Gruber for the following:

“It’s not widely publicized, but those integrated search bars in web browser toolbars are revenue generators. When you do a Google search from Safari’s toolbar, Google pays Apple a portion of the ad revenue from the resulting page. … The same goes for Mozilla (and, I presume, just about every other mainstream browser.) … For example, the Mozilla Foundation earned over $50 million in search engine ad revenue in 2005, mostly from Google. … Apple is currently generating about $2 million per month from Safari’s Google integration. That’s $25 million per year. If Safari for Windows is even moderately successful, it’s easy to see how that might grow to $100 million per year or more.“

Money -- it's what's for dinner. Not that there's anything wrong with it. (Insert your own cliche here).