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Google Shutting Out Rivals, Claims Russian Search Engine Yandex
suraj.sun writes "Ilya Segalovich, co-founder of Russia's leading search engine, Yandex, has accused Google of abusing its dominance to shut out competitors in cyberspace. Responding to comments made to the Guardian by Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder, about threats to the open internet, Ilya Segalovich described the U.S. search giant's popular smartphone platform, Android, as a 'strange combination of openness and not openness,' and its Chrome web browser as anti-competitive. Segalovich said that Brin should explain Google's 'semi-open' approach to search competitors before accusing others of endangering the unfettered internet, and suggested Google was guilty of foul play with its Chrome browser, which picks the company's own search engine as default for users, rather than offering a choice between rivals including Yahoo, Bing and Yandex."
Chrome is free. It doesn't cost a penny. Nothing (not counting incompetence) stops Yandex from creating their own free browser that defaults to Yandex. And for the M$ Weenies out there who will surely object prior to getting a clue, the right to use Explorer is purchased when you buy M$ garbage.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The story he was referring to was not about the ability to change the search engine in general, but rather about the dialog that pops up when you first run Chrome on a given machine and asks you to select the initial default search engine (kinda like that browser ballot box that Microsoft had to add in Windows to satisfy EU).
Which is a nice thing - though not legally mandated in any way (but I bet it was a pre-emptive move by Google's legal department). Except that they then specifically disabled it if current locale is Russian. Legal, of course, but kinda sleazy to do this kind of market differentiation.
All that said, the code seems to no longer be present in Chromium trunk.
He isn't blind. You've just stumbled across Google's underhandedness.
Chrome actually behaves differently based on different things, such as country. IN the US, Chrome prompts you to chose a search engine because they KNOW you'll choose Google. In Russia they don't do this.
They're the ones who seem to ignore my robots.txt.
Admittedly it may be someone posing as their spider, I blocked them anyway just to be on the safe side.
I have seen Yandex searching wide ranges of IPs for web servers. See: https://it.wiki.usu.edu/20111007_BeEvil You may want to give some thought to blocking the Russian Google-wanna-be Yandex. They may have have flipped their 'Evil' bit. In 2012, you should not find public web servers by scanning for TCP/80 and TCP/443. If you want to find public web servers, you spider the web. Or ask Google. If you scan the internet for TCP/80 and TCP/443, you will find private management interfaces. You find printers, routers, switches, control systems, web cams, network attached storage devices, and work-flow services. You will probably find more SCADA devices than actual public web servers. The results of this search are of great interest to the hacking community. It has very limited utility for anybody else. This is not trustworthy internet behavior.