Chrome now prompts you to choose a default search engine

If you’ve opened the Google Chrome web browser for the past few days on your PC, Mac, or Android smartphone, you may have seen a funny window. A new Chrome message will appear prompting you to select your default search engine. The display of this pop-up, as amazing as it may be, owes nothing to chance. This is a legal obligation for Google. The Mountain View-based company must comply with the new European regulation for digital markets, the famous DMA (Digital Markets Act).

As a reminder, the implementation of the DMA aims to break the monopolistic situations of the web giants. As such, Google needs to stop favoring its own solutions at the expense of those offered by competitors. The California-based company already had to remove Google Maps results from Google’s search results a few weeks ago. This time, Google needs to stop favoring its own search engine in its web browser. The company must then allow you to choose the search engine you want to use by default in your browser.

Because until now, Chrome automatically used Google as its native search engine. A choice that obviously suited Google, and that users weren’t necessarily looking to change.

Now, Chrome will ask you to make a choice, and you won’t be able to avoid it. To do this, Google has been displaying a list of seven alternative search engines for a few days, when Chrome starts, that can be configured as the default search engine. And, again, to avoid favoring one search engine over another, the Mountain View company claims to display them in random order.

You can choose from Google, Ecosia, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Lilo, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo Search, and Qwant to start your queries directly from Chrome’s address bar. Coincidentally or not, on our Windows PC, Google’s search engine was offered at the top of the list.