Chrome now forces you to choose a default search engine

For several days, Google's web browser has been displaying a screen asking you to select the search engine you want to use by default. It is an obligation that Google must honor in order to comply with the DMA.

If you've opened the Google Chrome web browser in the past few days on your PC, Mac, or Android smartphone, you may have seen a strange pop-up window. A new Chrome message appears inviting you to select your default search engine. The presentation of this pop-up, as surprising as it is, is not due to coincidence. This is a legal obligation on Google. Mountain View must comply with new European regulations for digital markets, the famous Digital Markets Act (DMA).

Search engines are displayed in random order

As a reminder, the DMA application aims to break the monopolistic positions of web giants. As such, Google must stop favoring its own solutions at the expense of those offered by the competition. The Californian company actually had to remove Google Maps results from Google search results a few weeks ago. This time, Google should stop favoring its own search engine in its web browser. Therefore, the company should allow you to choose which search engine you want to use by default in the browser.

Because until now, Chrome automatically used Google as its native search engine. This is a choice that clearly suits Google, and which users did not necessarily seek to modify.

Read also: Google Maps no longer showing in Google results? It's natural, and you have to adapt to it.

Chrome will now ask you to choose, and you won't be able to escape it probably. To do this, Google displays for several days, when you start Chrome, a list of seven alternative search engines, which can be configured as the default search engine. Again, to avoid favoring one search engine over another, Mountain View notes that it displays these engines in random order.

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