Google Chrome disables search engine selection in Russia

http://shamrin.posterous.com/70580913

by ash • 15 years ago

60 31 15 years ago

shamrin.posterous.com

yanw4• 15 years ago

If they are the upstarts in these countries they can do whatever they want. It's just the ballot, you can change the search engine from the settings just fine. No other browser offers a ballot anyway.

omgtehlion4• 15 years ago

most of (not so familiar with computers) users don’t change default settings.

yanw4• 15 years ago

So? that doesn't stop the other browsers (and it shouldn't).

Google isn't the dominant player there and they can do whatever they want to grab market share, there is nothing wrong with that.

barista• 15 years ago

IE does have a ballot in europe.

PJones• 15 years ago

That's for the browser itself, not the search engine.

dchest2• 15 years ago

Yandex has their own fork of Chromium: http://chrome.yandex.ru/

It's called "Хром" (Chrome).

Edit: this link is also the first one* if you search for "chrome" (or "хром") on Yandex: http://yandex.ru/yandsearch?text=chrome&lr=13461

Note that Yandex is the market leader.

*) Actually, it's zeroth (an ad that looks like search result) and 6th (the actual result).

Wilya• 15 years ago

I didn't know that.

Given that the "No-search-choice" code is in Chromium's codebase (as opposed to Chrome's), this might mean that neither Google nor Yandex want that change.

From what I saw, in Russia, Yandex has more reach to distribute its own fork than Google. So leaving the choice of the search engine isn't beneficial to any of the two.

It could be more of an agreement between Google and Yandex than a Google offensive.

omgtehlion4• 15 years ago

> Given that the "No-search-choice" code is in Chromium's codebase (as opposed to Chrome's), this might mean that neither Google nor Yandex want that change.

In fact, this changeset came from google employee.

billybob• 15 years ago

In Soviet Russia, search engine... selects you?

Sorry, couldn't resist.

JadeRobbins• 15 years ago

I saw your comment when looking through the comments to see if anyone had done it yet.

It had to be done.

esutton• 15 years ago

is it evil that google only advertises its own products on its homepage? The idea that google on occasion expends efforts to keep people in their ecosystem, whether its what happened on the Russian chrome, or the way they use the android marketplace to prevent fragmentation, is wrong is ridiculous. Google is a company not a charity. The fact that people expect it to be selfless is a testament to their actions, not a talking point that should be used to bludgeon them.

ellyagg3• 15 years ago

They make a lot of money out of the mileage they get for their reputation for "goodness". Everyone needs to understand that Google doesn't make selfless decisions, like you understand it. Without pointing out these examples, people will continue to harbor a mistaken impression of Google's motives.

VladRussian2• 15 years ago

there is some irony in that it disables the ballot not for Russia geographical (like IP based), it disables if you run in Russian locale anywhere in the world, ie. it disables it for Russia in mental space. Seems like pretty correct reflection of the fact that notion of ballots, choice, etc ... is foreign to Russian mentality.

eps• 15 years ago

But was Yandex on the list of search engine choices that got disabled? Because if it wasn't, then does it mean Google is trying to absorb Yahoo and Bing's shares?

tori-amos-fan• 15 years ago

The interesting fact is that the "fix" coincides with the ongoing huge advertising company for the Google Chrome browser on the major Russian TV channels.

Seems like the Google really doesn't want its browser to leak a share of newcomers to the Russian major search engine Yandex. A kind of optimization, yeah.

Google Chrome disables search engine selection in Russia

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