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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: 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