Google Chrome disables search engine selection in Russia | Hacker News Reader

Google Chrome disables search engine selection in Russia

shamrin.posterous.com

60 pointsash31 comments

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).

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.

> 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.

Not necessarily. Chromium has community committers too.

Miranda (commiter) is an engineer at Google.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

And you want g..gle to be dominant player everywhere?

Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't, but that's irrelevant. What's relevant is that Google wants to gain more market share there and you can't blame them for not promoting their competitors.

It's like asking Apple to offer a choice of browsers in Mac OS, because Microsoft also does it (at least in Europe after EU forced them to do it).

Nobody has said Google had to do it. They just.. did. Until.. they didn't. The OP is questioning the hypocrisy, which is of course a common meme. Google wants to have it both ways. I'd wager having drawn attention that this particular decision will ultimately be reversed, as it can't possibly be as valuable as our collection assumption of google's will and benevolence.

Maybe better choice would be removing this dialog in Chrome, not Chromium?

Maybe, but then we wouldn't know about the details, right? :)

And that's fine. And Google's reputation for the morality of its decisions should be equivalent to Apple's in that case, as well.

But it's not, and that's the reason to point out issues like these, to puncture the undeserved "goodness" reputation that Google cultivates, but is at odds with reality.

When Google offers users a choice, it appears that they're being fair, but Google offers that choice because they know that they won't lose market share. If they did start losing market share, the "choice" would be gone. That's not a choice, that's a calculated decision to foster the "goodness" reputation.

is this Larry or Sergey?

And when are you mass-penalizing travel sites not to compete with yours?

When your motto is "don't be evil", don't be surprised when you're held to a higher standard.

You think this "evil"? In other markets Chrome doesn't have a default search engine, in this one it does. If trying to protect your investment while keeping choice and providing an opensource browser is "evil" then your standards are too fucking high.

Defaulting a search engine isn't evil. But it's substantially less good than providing user choice the way google does everywhere else.

But not providing that choice based solely on a user's location, that's worthy of criticism.

Having different business strategies for different markets is worthy of criticism?!

The choice is there, you can change the settings, the ballot just doesn't popup.

I don't understand this. You are not criticizing other browser makers despite the fact that they have never offered this ballot. And in fact if Chrome had never introduced a ballot, you wouldn't have the chance to criticize when it was removed.

It just seems that by your standards Google would have come out better off having never introduced the ballot, which was a good idea.

I think the criticism here is hypocrisy. Google has a reputation of being extremely honest, open, fair, what-have-you. This reputation is exemplified by their offering a an initial choice in other markets. But, as this example illustrates, in the markets where it actually matters, they take that initial choice away. This is not really hard to understand.

Google adores the reputation they have for somehow being above the fray and simply being the best. They cultivate this image. But over and over it's revealed that they are a normal company, who does things such as "delayed open source" to keep partners in line, purposely introducing systematic flaws in their Web search API, and of course the foregoing "special circumstances", all of which are sneaky ways to have the appearance of the image they want, while keeping their competitive advantage.

I don't begrudge them these decisions, but all the Google fawning does get a little hard to take, as if they have some sort of moral superiority. The facts say otherwise. They are not altruistic. They do not make decisions that might hurt themselves in order to give others an equal chance. Google has replaced Apple is the PR machine extraordinaire in the modern corporate world.

>When your motto is "don't be evil", don't be surprised when you're held to a higher standard.

the higher standards are a little bit lower in Russia.

IE does have a ballot in europe.

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

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

Sorry, couldn't resist.

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

It had to be done.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com