Google Quietly Adds DuckDuckGo as a Search Engine Option for Chrome Users in About 60 Markets (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: In an update to the chromium engine, which underpins Google's popular Chrome browser, the search giant has quietly updated the lists of default search engines it offers per market -- expanding the choice of search product users can pick from in markets around the world. Most notably it's expanded search engine lists to include pro-privacy rivals in more than 60 markets globally. The changes, which appear to have been pushed out with the Chromium 73 stable release yesterday, come at a time when Google is facing rising privacy and antitrust scrutiny and accusations of market distorting behavior at home and abroad.

Comments

I use it nearly 100% of the time

[Lucas123]

People often complain Duckduckgo.com doesn't return the same number or quality of search results as Google; That's simply not true. The vast majority of the time I use it, I find the information I'm searching for on the first try. Years ago, I made a conscience decision to support Duckduckgo.com because of their ethics. Anyone who cares about their privacy should be supporting organizations that respect it and refuse to use technology that tracks you for marketing and other purposes. So, if you believe the same, step up and start using those technologies to the detriment of those that don't. Send a message.

Re:I use it nearly 100% of the time

[93 Escort Wagon]

Agreed. I suspect many times people will try an alternative once or twice - often early in that alternative’s life - and then hold that impression for the rest of their lives. Or they won’t even try it and just parrot what their “tech friend” said on the matter.

It’s similar to how, just the other day, I heard some dude railing against MySQL because it didn’t support transactions. He’d apparently heard that 10-15 years ago, and it was still his go-to argument against that product.

It’s funny how many people who work in the rapidly-changing field of tech still fall prey to that tendency.

Re:I use it nearly 100% of the time

[jjshoe]

MyISAM still doesn't support transactions.

Re:I use it nearly 100% of the time

[drinkypoo]

People often complain Duckduckgo.com doesn't return the same number or quality of search results as Google; That's simply not true. The vast majority of the time I use it, I find the information I'm searching for on the first try.

You mean it's simply not true for you. I try using it every so often and the information I want has literally never been on the first page, and usually isn't on the second or third either.

Anyone who cares about their privacy should be supporting organizations that respect it and refuse to use technology that tracks you for marketing and other purposes.

Trust? How cute.

Re:I use it nearly 100% of the time

[Anubis IV]

Agreed. Several years back I found it lacking and switched back to Google, but I gave it another shot a year or two back and haven't stopped using it ever since. Plus, with bangs, which are easily one of its best features and something I sorely miss whenever I sit down at someone else's computer, a Google search is never more than a "!g" away if for some reason I think I need it, though that happens less and less with time. Between using bangs to jump immediately to a particular site, the ability to change DDG's appearance, and the significantly better privacy, sticking with it has been an easy decision.

Re:I use it nearly 100% of the time

[lgw]

That's because DuckDuckGo is basically a frontend or wrapper for Google.

They've never been a frontend for Google. They started as an anonymizing frontend for Bing. They've grown a lot since then, though Bing is still a big part of results.

Markets? Do you mean Countries?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not reduce whole countries to just markets. We are users and citizens, not just consumers or products.

Re:Markets? Do you mean Countries?

[grumpy-cowboy]

Sorry but yes you are the product.

Re:Markets? Do you mean Countries?

[lgw]

Does Chrome autocomplete for you? Yeah, that's everything you type in the "omnibar" going to Google, and they save your history.

There's a Gooogle privacy setting for that:

Web & App Activity
(Paused)
Used by Assistant, Google Maps, and others

If you turn this setting on, Google will save your activity on Google sites and apps in your Google Account, including searches and associated info like location. You can also choose to save which apps you use, your Chrome history, and which sites you visit on the web.

All nicely GDPR compliant, I'm sure. You might check if you still have it enabled, as perhaps you're not comfortable with it.

If you search on DDG on Chrome, that url becomes part of your "Chrome history". And Google knows how to parse the URIs of common sites to extract everything.

I'd like to use duckduckgo but...

[QuietLagoon]

... it seems to purchase crawler data from other search engines, and the data is not as complete as the data google uses. Specifically, does duckduckgo purchase crawler data from bing? I see similar gaps in the results returned by bing and duckduckgo. Does duckduckgo have its own crawler?

If it isn't on duckduckgo

[p51d007]

I probably don't want to "find" it anyway.

Re: It's not that surprising

[jouassou]

You're both right. They have their own crawler, but also source results from ~400 other sites, including e.g. Bing, Wikipedia, and WolframAlpha.

Re:It's not that surprising

[Straumli Perversion]

https://duck.co/help/results/sources You can get google results by adding !g to your search (or !sp if you want to get google results through startpage.com).

Re:It's not that surprising

[cordovaCon83]

Please refer to this link. I don't see what the big deal is though - I use DuckDuckGo because they don't share my information with their partners. I could care less if they aggregrate their search results from many different sources.