They might obtain these statistics by mining the browser history associated with Google Accounts synced to the cloud.

No clue at all why politician was downvoted for this.

Isn't it well known that Google scoops up web history from the browser or have they stopped doing/never done this? In the latter case any pointers would be appreciated.

Dunno about currently, but about three years ago, if you opened your own site in Chrome, a couple minutes later you'd get a visit from Google bot on the same url.

Google has that data only when Chrome Sync is enabled, and only when you haven't set a Sync custom passphrase (which encrypts it end-to-end).

== most of the time. The majority of people don't care enough to change the defaults. Most of the time, they don't even think about whether there even is something to change. The overwhelming majority thinks roughly like this: "Ooo, Computer just knows all of this about me? Neat!".

Source: I work in education - even in a highly educated area in a developed EU country, young and old alike think like this.

In the default config the sync data is encrypted end-to-end with the user's Google account password. However, there is also an option to share browser history with Google for telemetric reasons, and it's on by default (regardless of sync encryption settings)

Isn't Chrome Sync opt-out at this point? I seem to recall some small controversy about that a while ago, and setting a passphrase seems like something that it's unlikely most people will do.

A default open browser history synced across devices seems like exactly the sort of thing that would show that DDG has increased its market share.

Sync is opt-in.

Look at the linked patch. They use the UMA histogram reporting mechanism, not Chrome Sync.

It need not be chrome users, Google could (ironically) get relatively good metrics just by how many times ddg has been googled.

Or from the Google router. Or their DNS service. Or ....

Or from how many times, people have shebanged their way to google from duckduckgo.

Shebanged or banged?

Banged, shebang is #!

> Is there any recent analysis on the usage stats that chrome is reporting back that someone could point to?

https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html#usages...

https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-user-experien...

Dunno about currently, but about three years ago, if you opened your own site in Chrome, a couple minutes later you'd get a visit from Google bot on the same url.

I don't believe this to ever have been the case.

Not only is Google's indexing infrastructure not that fast, but they deliberately don't do that because some poorly designed sites have passwords or unique keys in the URL that should not be used to retrieve content for the public search index.

This isn't sourced from any Chrome-collected data. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19393019 .