SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, 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 :-)