Earlier this year, an anti-trust lawsuit in Russia led Google to make some changes with Chrome on Android. The settlement required Google to develop a search widget that uses any search engine, which shipped as part of Chrome 60. Chrome also now asks users in Russia to pick a search engine when first installed. In a related move, Google is adding support for custom search engine logos in Chrome for Android.

At the moment, Chrome shows a Google logo on the New Tab Page, but only if you have Google selected as your search engine. If you use any other search engine (Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, etc), there is no logo at all. Yandex filed a bug report on the Chromium Bug Tracker in May, requesting that the New Tab Page show a logo for whatever search engine the user selects.

Chrome New Tab Page when Yandex is selected as the search engine

There is no evidence to suggest Google was forced to implement this functionality as part of the anti-trust lawsuit, but the Chrome team has been working on it. The list of search engines available in Chrome, called 'prepopulated_engines.json,' has been updated to add a logo for Yandex. Google has not yet added logos for other search engines. The URLs for the images are hosted on each search engine's web server (this is Yandex's logo, for example), so they can be updated at any time like a Google Doodle.

At the moment, it can only be activated by building Chromium for Android with the --search-provider-logo-url flag (it doesn't seem to be in chrome://flags on Stable/Beta/Dev/Canary). The feature is currently planned to ship in Chrome 61, the next major release.

Via: Chrome Story

Source: Chromium Project