Google has stopped "strangling goose": DuckDuckGo is included in the list of standard Chrome search engines for 60 countries

We definitely have some good news: Google, the search giant, has apparently revised its strategy for competitor DuckDuckGo. The company has included "duck" in the list of default search engines Chrome for 60 different regions. The update comes with version 73 of Chromium.

At the same time, Google engineers themselves claim that there is no “trick” in their actions - they just updated the lists according to the previously collected data on user preferences. Thus, the company recognizes that the popularity of DuckDuckGo has grown and has become noticeable for making such adjustments. The list of countries that have received DuckDuckGo out of the box is very diverse: from Costa Rico and Honduras to Canada, the United Kingdom and even India. True, for the Russian Federation the options for the search engine remained the same: Google, Bing, Yandex, Mail.ru.
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The current list of search engines available by default in Chromium and, accordingly, in Chrome, can be found on this GitHub page .

In fact, by saying “DuckDuckGo just became quite popular,” Google is a little cunning. Over the past few years, the company has been constantly confronted with the pressure of regional and global antitrust regulators who are trying to provide competitive conditions for other smaller projects. Earlier, on the territory of Russia, the inclusion in the “standard” list of available Chrome search engines was achieved by Yandex and Mail.ru, but the situation with DuckDuckGo is more interesting.

The authors of the anonymous search engine themselves advocate the freedom of users from collecting their personal data intended for the subsequent manipulation of their behavior. At the same time, the DuckDuckGo team is a zealous opponent of Google methods, which, for example, is clearly seen in one of the latest experiments conducted by the team regarding the collection of personal data and manipulation of the search sample even in incognito mode using Google Chrome ( original research , news on Habré ) .

The confrontation between Google and DuckDuckGo lasts for many years. The search engine itself appeared as a countermeasure against Google’s growing appetite for collecting user personal data. In response to the attacks of such a “kid” as DuckDuckGo, the search giant made an elegant move: for a long time, the domain duck.com belonged to Google and redirected users to the main page of the search engine google.com, which embarrassed those who heard “of some anonymous search, but did not know the full address of DuckDuckGo.com. At the same time, a thaw in relations between DuckDuckGo and Google came back in December 2018 - it was then that the search giant finally handed over the “hostage” to a competitor, and now duck.com leads directly to the DuckDuckGo.com page. By the way, changes to the repositories on GitHub were made at about the same time that the domain duck.com was transferred, that is, Google’s approach to this issue was a system one.

The change in the relationship between the opposition DuckDuckGo and Google is quite symbolic. For many years, the search giant has been confronted with various scandals about users' privacy and personal data collection. Google manipulates the issue, slips the goods, makes "user portraits" and even delves into the email correspondence of Gmail users. At some point there were so many scandals that entire collections of “exploits” of the search giant began to appear on the net. For example, googlemonitor.com (inactive since December 31, 2018) in 2012 alone offers a selection of 35 Google files in terms of privacy breaches. From the last: data leakage of 52.5 million users in 2018 already closed Google+.

But no matter how hard DuckDuckGo tries to fight technology giants, its existence requires money. So, the search engine shows ads strictly relevant to the search query, if this is relevant. For example, on the request “buy macbook”, DuckDuckGo shows one advertising link or several product images. Also, the search engine is working with Amazon and Apple (when you go to the retailer’s page and buy an Apple product, the search engine receives a small commission). Such a collaboration is not surprising, especially in the light of the fact that DuckDuckGo in January of this year switched to full use of MapKit JS, that is, refused to use OpenStreetMap and Google Maps in favor of Apple maps.