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Papas Fritas writes:
"There's an interesting read today by John Paul Titlow at FastCoLabs about DuckDuckGo, a search engine launched in 2008 that is now doing 4 million search queries per day and growing 200-500% annually. DuckDuckGo's secret weapon is hardcore privacy. When you do a search from DuckDuckGo's website or one of its mobile apps, it doesn't know who you are. There are no user accounts. Your IP address isn't logged by default. The site doesn't use search cookies to keep track of what you do over time or where else you go online.
'If you look at the logs of people's search sessions, they're the most personal thing on the Internet,' says founder Gabriel Weinberg. 'Unlike Facebook, where you choose what to post, with search you're typing in medical and financial problems and all sorts of other things. You're not thinking about the privacy implications of your search history.' DuckDuckGo's no-holds-barred approach to privacy gives the search engine a unique selling point as Google gobbles up more private user data. 'It was extreme at the time,' says Weinberg. 'And it still may be considered extreme by some people, but I think it's becoming less extreme nowadays. In the last year, it's become obvious why people don't want to be tracked.'"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by allsorts46 on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:35PM
In case anyone knows any interesting references I can read...
How do we know that they really do (or don't do) what they say they do (or don't)?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:39PM
Read their code. It's open source.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:42PM
Devil's advocate: how do you know that it's what they're running?
(Score: 5, Funny) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:50PM
You hack into their servers and check? ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by animal on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:57PM
It may be open source, but are they running that code?
Somehow they do make money. Maintaining something like that doesn't come cheap.
I'd feel much better if they were more transparent and letting us know how they operate, how they pay the bills etc.
Google is snooping all around our computers, but at least they admit it.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Fluffeh on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:05PM
Taken from Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
Seems pretty straightforward in terms of how they make their money...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:48PM
I can't see anything in that quote where the money comes from. You know, many people using your service for free doesn't magically make you money.
It says they have a small number of contractors. Do those contractors pay them? And if so, what do they get in return?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Fluffeh on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:59PM
The Wikipedia article states that the revenue is from advertising.
If you perform a search on the site, you will see simple sponsored links at the top of the results. No adwords, no sneaky embedded "paid" search results, just a result in a yellow/orange highlight with the words "Sponsored Link" at the bottom right.
Enough visitors and that's a simple way to make money covering costs.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Friday February 21 2014, @05:37AM
There was an article with the founder. DDG makes money by displaying targeted ads. They use the search query to do the targeting. He explained that knowing the search query is 95% of the equation. Obviously, they'll know that because the user typed it in. So they make money the same way google does, by serving ads, except instead of trying to compile a dossier on you like google, they take the straight forward approach of assuming that if you are searching for something, you are interested in it.
Now, how can you tell if their servers are running their software? You can't. But what advantage is there to not? If they get busted one time, their business is dead forever and all the work that went into it evaporates. I do have some faith in enlightened self-interest.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @07:13AM
That's all true but all it takes is one "National Security Letter" or similar.
I don't really care that much about the NSA et all spying on my searches. To me the real problem is that Google's searches have gone down in quality. It seems like I have to switch to "verbatim" mode for almost everything (or I get "joe sixpack" results without the search terms I'm looking for) but switching to "verbatim" sometimes seems to not rank the pages as usefully.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Caballo Negro on Friday February 21 2014, @08:12AM
They also ask you politely to whitelist their site if they spot you using an ad blocker. I've complied.
(Score: 1) by mister_playboy on Friday February 21 2014, @11:45AM
Indeed... that is the one and only whitelisting I've ever made in ABP after having used it for about 6 years!
(Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday February 21 2014, @08:55AM
They do a few other things too. For example, if you type !amazon in your search terms, then you get the result of your search on the Amazon site, but via the referrer link. This means that they get some percentage of anything you buy. I usually just type things I'm looking to buy into the search box and then add !amazon if I don't find it in a quick search of the web.
Those commands are really useful. The !freebsd tag will search FreeBSD man pages, !devapple will search the Apple developer database, and so on. I find it really useful to have a single search box that can redirect me to all of the site-specific searches that I use easily. Most of the ones I use don't provide referrer kick-backs, but some do, and I'm very happy for DDG to get the money.
I switched to using them around 2008 when Google decided to hijack the up and down arrow keys in the search box. On OS X, up-arrow in any text field means jump to the start, and having to relearn muscle memory for a single Google text box was a UI decision that killed the utility of the site for me. At the time, DDG also did the infinite-scrolling thing (no other search engines did, although they all added it soon after) and had a much cleaner UI. I exchanged a few emails with Gabriel over usability issues that were present and he set up a test site for me to complain about and then fixed all of the issues and rolled out that version on the main site. Amazing service and not something I'd see from any of the big search companies (and I know quite a few people who work at Google and Yahoo! personally...).
I still find their zero-click information very useful. Gabriel has actually been very clever there, avoiding the need for complex natural language processing by making it easy for users to explicitly disambiguate what they really mean.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1) by hubie on Friday February 21 2014, @03:25PM
Of course, that isn't always the case [youtube.com]. :)
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday February 21 2014, @03:44PM
The best part of that video:
Mr. Internet on a Segway towing a trailer of cats.
(Score: 1) by hubie on Friday February 21 2014, @04:23PM
With his latte and bluetooth earpiece. :)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Angry Jesus on Friday February 21 2014, @12:47AM
No it doesn't ... at least not what you quoted. It just says they are "non-ambitious" - but what does that really mean? Apparently he does have VC money and as a group they tend to take "ambition" to the deepest depths of evil.
(Score: 4, Informative) by FatPhil on Friday February 21 2014, @01:06AM
> May 2012, the search engine was attracting 1.5 million searches a day
And now, 4m s/d.
? exp(log(4/1.5)*(12/21))
1.75
So there's 75% growth per year, not 200-500%
> 45,000,000 per month in October 2012
So 1.5m s/d
So between May and October 2012 there was 0% growth, not 200-500%
These figures do not add up (or multiply, divide, log, or exp).
I did sums at university, dammit!!?!?!? (which my mum still says, without the dammit)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Informative) by Geotti on Friday February 21 2014, @04:41AM
No it's not: [duck.co]
You can do a lot with the open parts, though.
Get started here [duck.co] and here [github.com]. If you do, be sure to sign up for the mailing list [listbox.com] and/or join #duckduckgo on freenode.
There's a VM image [github.com] to get you started and a vagrantfile [github.com] for those who prefer that (no dockerfiles [that I know of], though).
Happy duckduckhacking!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Professr on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:42PM
More importantly, how do we know there isn't a nice little NSA box sitting in front of their open-source code?
(Score: 5, Funny) by snick on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:46PM
Get serious.
Of course there is a nice little NSA box sitting in front of their open-source code
Where do you think you are? America?
(Score: -1) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @06:38AM
Traceroute shows me about thirty of them. Probably thirty one.
(Score: 2) by h on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:00PM
Can we really trust them if they're situated in the USA? Can't the NSA just pull whatever they want from them?
Pardon my ignorance on the matter, I've not really kept up with all the Snowden Cypherpunk NSA battles etc
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jcd on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:09PM
Honestly, you can't really trust a packet that goes anywhere near the US. But at least DDG is a step in the right direction - away from the corporate overlords that want to hoover up every little detail about you to sell you MOAR STUFF.
"What good's an honest soldier if he can be ordered to behave like a terrorist?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @03:29PM
Then where can you trust your packets to go? Is it NSA == bad guys, everyone else == good guys? You're not one of those "USA is the Great Evil" guys and work that into all your comments are you? That pretty much ran me off of the other site and I shudder to think that cancer will be picked up here so soon, but your +5 mod suggests otherwise.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Angry Jesus on Friday February 21 2014, @12:41AM
Can't the NSA just pull whatever they want from them?
One of the benefits of not keeping records is that you never have to do the work ($$) of complying a subpoena (or national security letter) to hand over any records. That doesn't stop the NSA from recording all the traffic in and out of their site, but it does make retroactive fishing expeditions much harder. And if you are lucky the encryption on the traffic is enough to make it too expensive to decrypt in bulk making it useless for fishing expeditions too.
(Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday February 21 2014, @08:58AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 5, Informative) by Angry Jesus on Friday February 21 2014, @11:51AM
One of the suspected methods of NSA interception is factory-compromised SSL front-ends that covertly expose their internal keys through not-so-random choices of various packet headers. That makes most high-traffic SSL sites potential targets of passive sniffing.
(Score: 4, Funny) by darinbob on Friday February 21 2014, @02:44AM
It's simple. Just search for bomb making supplies, then time how long it is until you get a knock on the door.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by visaris on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:40PM
I think most people probably don't care about privacy much, unfortunately. The quality of the search results probably matters more to them. I haven't used DuckDuckGo; how do current users think the results compare to Google, et al.?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by dx3bydt3 on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:49PM
In my experience the search results from DuckDuckGo aren't nearly the same quality as those I get from Google. That said, they are also quite different than those you get from Google and Bing. Sometimes when searching for obscure things that difference comes in handy.
(Score: 4, Informative) by No.Limit on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:20PM
I've had the same experience. However, I just switch to google if I need better results.
That's mostly the case when I want to find out things about 'niche technical subjects'. Like today searched for spaghetti stack.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @03:38PM
It's better to use startpage.com (or ixquick.com - it's the same as startpage) as your backup than google.
(Score: 1) by maxwell demon on Friday February 21 2014, @07:14PM
It's not the same, it's just the same company. Startpage is basically a Google anonymizer, while Ixquick uses several search engines.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:57PM
I've used duckduckgo and I find the search results a bit lacking compared to google. Personally, I prefer startpage.com which seems to just act as a proxy between you and google. You end up with google quality results, but google loses the ability to track you. Startpage claims to not be recording IP addresses or using any tracking cookies.
The only issue I can see with startpage is their reliance on google. I'm sure if they got too popular, google would find a way to block queries coming from their servers to shut them down.
(Score: 2) by jcd on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:07PM
I use an instance of searx on a friend's server and I worry about the same thing. It's ultimately meta-search, which relies on Google's infrastructure. I've looked up search alternatives, but they often provide lousy results. I used to use DDG before all of the hubbub about privacy &c (they aren't generally trusted any more by the super-paranoid), but I found myself sneaking back to Google and feeling rather guilty.
Anyone know of any other real alternatives? I've heard of Yacy, but I'm not sure I want to run a p2p search service on my machine. Not only do I have limited internet usage, but I don't trust the security and I'm not confident enough in my ability to code to check the source myself.
"What good's an honest soldier if he can be ordered to behave like a terrorist?"
(Score: 1) by acid andy on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:38PM
I think the Duck Duck Go results aren't bad and like the other person said you can soon get used to trying Duck Duck Go first and only resorting to Google if you can't find what you needed.
Duck Duck Go does seem to give relevant results. I just get the sense that they've indexed fewer pages than Google, perhaps a lot fewer.
I am sick of how bad Google's results seem to have got compared to 5 or 10 years ago. I know they've been fighting an arms race against the SEOers and autoblogs but their algorithm seems utterly dumbed down these days. I hate the way they outright ignore some of the keywords I type in or the algorithm acts like it knows better and searches for different words that are only vaguely related.
I also get pages and pages of commercial stuff that all seems almost identical. Maybe that's the blackhat SEOers again but I'm not so sure. The thing is Google most likely wants these millions of ad laced blogs because they're getting revenue through Adsense.
Consumerism is poison.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Friday February 21 2014, @09:15AM
I switched to DDG around 2008, and I fall back to Google about once or twice a month. I've found that most of the time Google is a complete waste of time. DDG will say 'no results' for a query, Google will say '10,000 results', but none of the ones I try are even remotely related to what I'm looking for. I don't know why Google thinks that I'll be more favourably disposed to them if they give me nonsense and waste my time than if they just say 'no pages contain that phrase, sorry'. The other irritation I find with Google is that they'll provide exactly the same mailing list post on 100 different list archive sites. Their algorithm really ought to be able to group those and say 'see almost identical pages...' as a separate link.
Your AdSense comment is spot on. For Google, there's always a conflict of interest between wanting to avoid spam in the search engine and wanting to promote sites that actually give them revenue. Hopefully they manage to balance this in favour of maintaining their reputation, but there's always going to be pressure towards the long-term game. DDG, in contrast, simply doesn't have this pressure. Their revenue comes entirely from the sponsored links, so their only incentives are to give useful enough search results that people keep using them and to give accurate enough sponsored links that people will want to click on them.
The odd thing is, this is how Google used to work: they'd base their ads not on their profile of you, but on their analysis of what you were looking at (the page containing the ads or your search terms). Back then, I clicked on their links a lot, because if I'm looking for information about widgets there's a good chance that I'm interested in companies trying to sell me widgets too. Now, they base it on a profile of me and so are most likely to show me ads for things I've already bought and don't want another one - by the time I do, they've given up and started showing me ads for something else.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:39PM
I care about privacy as something I have a right to, but I also appreciate that Google provides some pretty decent services for me for 'free'. So far, Google has a very good privacy and security record. My information is valuable to them so they don't want it leaked. Yeah, if they go evil, it could be bad, but for now, the services provided are worth the information I provide. I also block ads, but when if I unblock them, I'd prefer they be as targeted as possible.
The big problem I see is not with Google search so much as the tracking cookies on all the other sites that affect those that just Google search (as an example). The 'payment' in that case may be a bit high for them, assuming they are aware. I should be easier for those people to opt out.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Cactus on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:54PM
They have a few other neat features, but the !bang commands are easily my favorite. Only reason I don't use it now is I ended up doing a full wipe of my comp, and I (still) haven't gotten around to redoing the about:config.
(Score: 2, Informative) by MrNemesis on Friday February 21 2014, @10:42AM
Haven't you been able to do this in browsers themselves for years? In FF and Opera, you can right-click on a website's search box and use the "Add a keywords for this search" or whatever the Opera version is called; annoyingly it insists on saving it as a bookmark but you can define IMDB as, say, "imdb" and typing in "imdb some film wot I want to search for" will ping you off to IMDB's search page. Much faster IMHO and with zero reliance on a third party, and much more portable than relying exclusively on about:config hackery.
"To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."
(Score: 1) by pjbgravely on Friday February 21 2014, @12:03AM
It also seems Google copied DDG's search result showing a photo and description orf the result. Perhaps they both copied Bing, which I have never used.
(Score: 1) by TheRaven on Friday February 21 2014, @09:18AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @03:46PM
Nice!
I didn't know DDG had a bang for Startpage image search. Thanks!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pp on Friday February 21 2014, @02:25AM
They farm out their results from various sources, but unfortunately they pick up some of the quirks and errors from their result sources.
One of the things that bugs me the most about Google, which DDG seems to do too, is the silent dropping of search terms to boost the number of results. It's as if getting two million irrelevant results is better than getting the four results that you actually want.
The worst part is that the search term dropping is silent in DDG. I believe that Google at least tells you when certain terms aren't present in a particular result. In DDG, you can't always tell.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ztoth on Friday February 21 2014, @02:53AM
I've been using DDG for years (i.e. since the privacy reveals), pretty much exclusively. It gives results good enough, I rarely have to "fall back" to G or other engines.
One killer feature DDG provides is called !bang [duckduckgo.com], which allows you to search for keywords in specific websites very easily, without going to that website first. For example, if you type "!a arduino" in DDG, it will take you to Amazon and search arduino stuff for you. There's a shortcut for every major site and the list keeps growing. You can even do this !bang thing in the URL bar if DDG is your default engine, which has simplified my life a lot...
DDG lacks some features like image search. For that I use startpage, and with DDG's !bang feature it's as simple as typing "!spi natalie portman" in the URL bar :-)
(Score: 1) by MaxiCat_42 on Friday February 21 2014, @05:39AM
I usually use DDG when I want fairly specific answers to technical queries. For example, I bought some ultrasonic range finder modules and wanted details on their use with microcontrollers. Google gave me a page of drell (sorry, I'm watching Farscape ATM), whereas DDG gave specific links to the info that I needed. It's the default on Rasperian too. Simple, basic and uncluttered design: I like it.
Phil.
Lexicostatistical Glottochronology - you know it makes since.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @09:35AM
I use D2G regularly. I find that it is more reliable than Google, in the sense that it won't arbitrarily decide to leave out keywords of your search without telling you so. It enables me to search pretty well.
D2G has some nice features, such as highlighting the "official" site for a product, and putting a short link to a Wikipedia article first. That really speeds up searching.
OTOH, regularly, D2G doesn't find an acceptable answer, when Google (but also Bing) can. This mostly happens to me when looking for something technical, e.g. some aspect of multiple measurements in statistical testing. So I do switch from time to time.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Keldrin on Friday February 21 2014, @02:24PM
I use DDG for about 95% of my searches, and have pretty much since they started up. Their results are much better now than they used to be, but they still aren't quite on par with Google. Every now and then I'm looking for something very obscure and specific, and Google will usually have that answer. But since I can just append !G to DDG, it will send me over to the google results without having to change the little picture in my search window.
I mainly use them because it honestly seems like they are just trying to provide a helpful and useful service, and they are doing much better at the "don't be evil" thing than Google.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by martyb on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:41PM
So, with over 4 million page hits a day, and having an index of (a large enough part of) the internet, how do they pay for it?
Do they have free bandwidth and servers?
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 1) by demonlapin on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:53PM
(Score: 5, Informative) by etherscythe on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:58PM
That, and the quality of search results, was my concern with it when I first looked for an alt-Google. I've settled on Startpage [startpage.com] (or Ixquick [ixquick.com] for those who like a metasearch option). They have sponsored results, but the user details are not shared as detailed here [startpage.com].
Follow the money, as they say. Also note that Ixquick has been certified by an EU privacy initiative, for whatever that's worth.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 1) by martyb on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:28PM
etherscythe wrote:
I was unaware of those two search engines; thanks for the links!
So, my fellow Soylenters, what do YOU use for a search engine when you don't use google, bing, or duckduckgo?
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2, Informative) by maxwell demon on Friday February 21 2014, @12:11AM
Well, that thread reminded me of metager, [metager.de] which I had used years ago, but somehow forgotten about. I now looked, and they also have a policy of not tracking users [metager.de], and they even offer a TOR hidden service search.
Given that I haven't used it for years, I naturally can't tell how good the search results are. However one nice point is that they tell you which search engine found the specific links (which includes search engines I've never even heard about).
BTW, Soylent News is link #15 when searching for Soylent News. ;-) [metager.de]
One advantage of Startpage/Ixquick is that they by default use POST instead of GET, so your search terms don't show up in your browser history.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by siliconwafer on Friday February 21 2014, @12:51AM
They have advertisements ("sponsored links"). Presumably that provides revenue and perhaps profit.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Friday February 21 2014, @02:33AM
siliconwafer (709) wrote:
Thanks for the reply! Of course, and only AFTER submitting my question, I went to do a search on DDG and noticed a new-to-me request to white-list them in AdBlockPlus. Up until then, I honestly had no idea they even HAD ads!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 1) by ragequit on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:46PM
TFS summary says --by default-- /me applies freshly minted tinfoil hat.
The above views are fabricated for your reading pleasure.
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:05PM
/me applies slightly soiled and tarnished tinfoil hat.
Modern tinfoil contains no tin [wikipedia.org].
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 3, Informative) by EvilJim on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:22PM
yup, if your hat doesn't 'cry' while you're shaping it, it's no good. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_cry [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Foobar Bazbot on Friday February 21 2014, @12:06AM
Re: your sig, sudo -i is generally the recommended way to obtain a root shell. It also, unlike 'sudo su', moves you to root's home directory -- unless root's $HOME == cats's $HOME, most shells would show a prompt like 'root /home/cats#' after 'sudo su', but 'root ~#' after sudo -i; I don't know of any that, by default, uses $SUDO_USER to show 'cats ~#' in any circumstance. (Sorry to be "that guy", but it's who I am.)
Like 'su -', 'sudo -i' is very cautious (some might say paranoid) about the user's environment variables, to protect against privilege escalation, e.g. the case where, having obtained access to your non-root account e.g. while you walked away from your terminal, somebody set up you 'export EDITOR=thebomb', where thebomb is a program that checks effective uid (and does malicious things, if zero) then execs the editor you expected. "sudo su -" would accomplish a similar end, though the details of which environment variables are sanitized, and where the new values are loaded from, do differ slightly.
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Friday February 21 2014, @12:24AM
I'll get that fixed this weekend. I also wanted a third line, "cats ~# write base All your FILES are belongs to us." but it wasn't fitting/formatting correctly when I was setting up the sig.
Thanks for the heads up.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 1) by pp on Friday February 21 2014, @02:41AM
The -i option is for "simulate initial login", so it changes to the user's home directory and .profile/.login and the shell's .rc are sourced.
-s is good if you just want to become a user while maintaining all of your initial user's environment.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Buck Feta on Friday February 21 2014, @12:52AM
>> Modern tinfoil contains no tin [wikipedia.org].
Sure. That's what they want you to believe.
- fractious political commentary goes here -
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:54PM
'If you look at the logs of people's search sessions, they're the most personal thing on the Internet,'
This is a big reason I use Tor for a lot of my casual browsing. Tor uses another privacy orientated search page https://startpage.com/ [startpage.com] on top of the anonymity provided by the Tor network. I can imagine some NSA spook drawing some horrible conclusions from my innocent curiosity in some eccentric and controversial things.
(Score: 5, Informative) by revilo on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:01PM
It is not only the privacy but the search bubble which is of concern.
A good selling point for Duckduckgo is that we are more and more
fed search results based on where we live, what we have searched
before and what my operating system we use. We want an objective answer to a question
and not a biased projection of what the search engine thinks, is interesting for us.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by JimmyCrackCorn on Friday February 21 2014, @12:09AM
Maybe a more powerful statement toward search diversity is to accomplish economic boycott on a mass scale by not using Google and using some other search that does not use Google. DuckDuckGo has a sponsored link at the top of the search results, presumably an income stream.
The general rule of thumb seems to be that a company has value if it has users.
It is not that google doesn't give me results, it is the results of us using google that give me pause.
(Score: 1) by SMI on Friday February 21 2014, @01:41AM
Very insightful, especially that last line..
(Score: 1) by TheRaven on Friday February 21 2014, @09:21AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1) by evk on Friday February 21 2014, @09:42AM
I'm a bit torn on this issue. By principle i dislike the idea of a search bubble, but I often find that Google finds me what I want at once, while I have to spend some time with DDG to find the same thing.
So the bubble can be good or bad, depending on the goal with the search. If I'm researching some issue and want to get something close to an objective view, I certainly don't want the be walled in by my previous activity.
If I search for some specific resource, it's another issue. I don't want the alternatives. I know exactly what I want, and _mostly_ Google will give it to me.
(Score: 1) by lhsi on Friday February 21 2014, @02:33PM
Imagine if you could prefix a search query with "pop" to have non-bubble search results :-)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by duvel on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:04PM
This is actually something for which we have to thank the NSA and Facebook.
If it wasn't for them, people wouldn't worry nearly as much about their privacy. Increased usage of anonymous search engines, of Tor, of VPN's: it all comes from the valiant efforts of NSA, Facebook and the like to let everybody understand the value of privacy.
And let's not forget the efforts of the music industry. In Europe, the lobbying of the music industry has gotten legislators to the point where they have made accessing torrent websites illegal (never mind that those sites don't contain any 'illegal' content themselves). This is enforced by altering DNS. Every visit to a torrent web site is diverted to a page warning about the illegal activity you're embarking on. Thanks to this, I have started using Tor.
It's all good.
This Sig is under surveilance by the NSA
(Score: 5, Informative) by zford on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:20PM
I frequently use DuckDuckGo for their goodies. For example, searching for NameVirtualHost [duckduckgo.com] will bring up the relevant section of the Apache docs.
https://duckduckgo.com/goodies [duckduckgo.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Foobar Bazbot on Friday February 21 2014, @12:41AM
Nice superlatives. Funny how I don't see a word about ixquick/startpage in TFA; I guess we're to take it as a matter of faith that they are larger and/or less fierce than duckduckgo?
I don't wanna call slashvertisement, exactly (it seems like just another US author being totally ignorant of foreign search engines), but this article is the sort of puff-piece that could really use an editorial note mentioning the other contenders.
(Score: 2, Funny) by EETech1 on Friday February 21 2014, @02:15AM
Ahemmm... Wouldn't that be a Soilentvertisement?
(Score: 1) by Foobar Bazbot on Friday February 21 2014, @05:04AM
Well, it's supposed to be a dirty word, so I think it's one context where retaining "slash" makes sense. ;)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @07:23AM
Which engine does DDG use? Bing or google? I was under the impression they use bing, since i remember going there and there somewhere saying "powered by bing" or something, but now i tried to look it up, but i can't find shit from their site.
Anyway, i use startpage.com, they use google. Just like many here have said about DDG, you don't get all the results you would with google, but then again, you don't usually get that many relevant results with google either (it was different 15 years ago, when there weren't so many fucking ad pages and shit around).
(Score: 1) by timbim on Friday February 21 2014, @08:21AM
Yeah I could not find the association to bing either, thought I heard that too.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @08:30AM
> Which engine does DDG use? Bing or google?
You are aware that there are other ways to build a search engine than use an existing back-end right ? How do you think such back-ends exist in the first place.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @11:27AM
I am, but these days, who does that? Google, microsoft and that wolf something something
(Score: 2, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday February 21 2014, @09:23AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @03:35PM
Who ever tagged this redundant should link where this is exlained already or maybe not tag at all and let someone else do it if he's so damn lazy.
(Score: 3, Informative) by zafiro17 on Friday February 21 2014, @12:05PM
I use DDG as my primary search engine and stick to it whenever possible. It's not perfect - unfortunately, Google definitely provides better results and also offers things like address and image search that are pretty darned useful.
But I'm willing to usually forego those aspects in order to prevent Google from getting more of my data. Seriously, to all the people wondering if the NSA isn't secretely pasting your packets back together, keep a grip on the big picture! Whatever the NSA might be doing to DDG, they're also doing it to Google, so it is a tie. Meanwhile, DDG makes it a policy to keep your searches private and untracked, while Google makes it a policy to rope you increasingly into their ecosystem the way Microsoft did so effectively with their products back in the 90s.
I really hate it that Google asked me a hundred times if I wanted to convert my Youtube profile to a Google Plus profile. A said "no" every single time, and then they went ahead and did it anyway, goddammit. A week later, I commented on some video and Google went ahead and published that comment on my G+ feed. WTF! It makes me not want to even use Youtube anymore.
DDG might be a search engine whose searches aren't the number 1. But it's worth it in order to spread my data around more providers instead of just letting Google have it all. (I also use fastmail.fm for IMAP email, fruux.com for calendaring and addressbook, and Opera for a browser). My two big failures in that area are and Android phone in my pocket (can't help it, I love the Note III) and using G+ as a place to post mindless drivel.
DDG remains my go-to search engine and I think you should use it too. Also, cute duck icon!
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 1) by thoughtlover on Wednesday February 26 2014, @07:19PM
Why use a competing search engine when you're only going to end at a URL that has some Google-based service attached to it?
Almost every website out there uses some Google service, like googleapis, googletypekit, or even Youtube. I constantly deny sites like facebook, etc., but Google's dev tools are used almost everywhere by developers.
Google still sees your IP address soon after you've clicked on a DDG or StartPage link, and they know they just served up that link to a search engine, so...