Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by TheLoneWolfling 4113 days ago
The bigger question is: how does Google know what your default search engine is?

Are they tracking referrers from DDG, or what?

2 comments

Or anything else it seems. As in, I'm making my own search engine that can redirect to Google and http://10.0.1.42/?q=google+whatever will do it too. What really confuses me is that people will still try to link to Google results in forums and it might say that (which could get really confusing).

Quick test of that: https://www.google.com/search?q=google

Yeah, the box shows up if I click that in Firefox, even in private browsing. You'd think they could make it show up on the homepage when clicked from Yahoo, which most Firefox people would probably do if their default got changed. But anyone who uses DDG probably did it on purpose.

Err wait, this might be just me as I disabled cross-site referer header in about:config.
I do not think what your default search engine is really matters. I see that Ad all the time even when Google is set as my default search engine.