Is Google a web browser or search engine?
Google is first a search engine, what we call Google is referencing to the search engine of the company. But Google has built and is building a lot of different tools, including the very famous web browser, called Google Chrome.
The difference between Google and Google Chrome
Google is the search engine while Google Chrome is the web browser
The Google search engine
The search engine is the first tool that Google built, the one that makes them so famous. It’s what you are using every time you are searching for something. The URL of the Google search engine is www.google.com, so every time you end up on this one, you are using the Google search engine.
You can compare it to Bing, the search engine made by Microsoft. Or also Yahoo, which is not used a lot anymore but still by a few people.
The Google Chrome web browser
The Google Chrome web browser is the second most famous tool of Google. A web browser is completely different from a search engine. A web browser is used to navigate the internet and translate the source code of the website into something humans can read and understand correctly, while a search engine is used to find websites related to the topic you type in the search bar.
Google Chrome has been developed in 2008 by the team in charge of Firefox contributions
Other famous web browsers are Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Opera. Internet Explorer was also a web browser, made by Microsoft, but was very old and has been replaced by Microsoft Edge on the later version of Windows. Firefox is the only completely open-source browser
The Google Chrome web browser is using the Google search engine
I know it’s getting confusing and this is why people do not make the difference between them. So when you are using the Google Chrome web browser, and I guess you are using it as most people do, and that you are typing a new search request in the search bar at the top of Google Chrome, you are using the Google Search Engine.
Indeed, this search bar will directly launch a search request, instead of going first on google.com and making the search request next. It’s kind of a shortcut.
Are every web browsers using the Google search engine ?
Almost all of the most popular web browsers are using the Google search engine in their search bar by default, in the same way as Google Chrome. It can be changed in the configuration of the web browser if you want to change it and use another search engine.
The Microsoft Edge web browser is not using the Google search engine by default and is using Bing instead. It makes sense when you think about it, as Bing has been made by Microsoft.
Should you continue to use the Google search engine ?
The Google search engine is not the most popular one for no reason, it’s also the better one. Better because their algorithm is more developed than others, but also because they are using a lot of user data to be able to provide the best answer for every search request.
If you are not comfortable with this, if you want to have more control other your data and more privacy, then you should probably try another search engine. There are a lot of different ones that gives you more privacy, but the most famous one is duckduckgo.com .
Also, Google Chrome is not the most privacy-focused web browser. That's why users concerned about privacy, like most of the Linux users, like to use Firefox instead
Author
Maxime Levesque is a technical engineer with more than 5 years of professional experience. He is an expert in computer and phones, mostly on Apple products. Maxime is also the founder of TechBrowser.
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