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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."
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.