[em-bee]

i would not call this hijacking but pushing their products. it's essentially targeted advertising. so yeah, chrome is used as a platform to advertise google services. somehow that is not a surprise anymore. it's actually surprising that they didn't do this from day one. and for me it is another reason to avoid chrome.

hijacking would be is you want to search on github but instead of getting github search results, you get google search results.

[j33zusjuice]

I think they meant hijacking in the sense that they read his search on another site. So they’re either scanning the page loads, or reading your keystrokes, or something that is sending the data back to Google.

[em-bee]

why would that be sending back data to google without a users action? sure it could. but there is absolutely no need to send anything until that google button is clicked. so it's really just advertising i think. and it's technically no worse than making a selection and getting an entry in the context menu to send that selection to your preferred search engine.

the button as it appears would not be a problem if it would offer to send your github or twitter search to your configured default search engine instead of always to google.

come to think of it, did anyone check if that feature is configurable? most people still have google as the default search engine so it would naturally default to google even if it wasn't actually tied to google.