Google has updated the list of default engines it offers per market in a bid to expand the choice of search engines its users can select from around the world. It has notably added pro-privacy rivals in more than 60 global market.
The changes were pushed out yesterday with the Chromium 73 stable just in time to react to the current issue of distress that Google is facing- regarding privacy and antitrust scrutiny of market distorting behavior. Many governments have made plans to update the Competition policy in order to favour smaller technology innovators.
Google software engineer, Orin Jaworski has however stated that the list of search engine references for each country “is being completely replaced based on new usage statistics from recently collected data.” The access to choose between Search Engines per country is only available to four market shares.
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DuckDuckGo (DDG) pro-privacy search engine (Google’s rival) is the greatest beneficiary of the update. DDG wasn’t added initially. French search engine Qwant, has also been added as a new option, though only in its home market, France.
DDG has been added in Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brunei, Bolivia, Brazil, Belize, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Germany, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Faroe Islands, Finland, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, India, Iceland, Italy, Jamaica, Kuwait, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Moldova, Macedonia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Puerto Rico, Portugal, Paraguay, Romania, Serbia, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, El Salvador, Trinidad and Tobago, South Africa, Switzerland, U.K., Uruguay, U.S. and Venezuela.
DuckDuckGo’s founder, Gabe Weinberg said “We’re glad that Google has recognized the importance of offering consumers a private search option.” Google passed the Duck.com domain to DDG in December 2018 after redirecting it to Google.com for years.
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