Duck Duck Go Searches Are Now Externally Anonymous
gabrielweinberg.com
gabrielweinberg.com
The way you listen to your users and implement fixes and suggestions quickly is probably almost as important to your success as good search results right now, at least to me. Makes me want to use your site more.
Thank you for taking the privacy of your users seriously! Most of us aren't spies or Chinese dissidents, but the principle of privacy is very important to me, and I'm glad to see that it is to you too.
Hi, I'm a longtime AdWords customer (I spend in the mid four figures per year). It is wonderful... except that customer service is provided through Google. Or, frequently in my experience, not provided through Google.
When the algorithms are working well, AdWords is amazing. Quite literally life changing for me. But for AdWords, I'd still be at the day job.
Computer algorithms do not always work the way we'd hope they would. In many multi-billion dollar businesses run by grownups, for example banks, there are humans in the loop for when computers make mistakes, for example marking as fraudulent my $550 monthly AdWords bill. There are a variety of means by which I can contact a human at the bank, explain my problem, and get effective help at resolving it. My bank makes less than $200 off of me a year.
Google hates dealing with customers because it doesn't scale nearly so well as throwing another 10,000 cheap boxes at the problem. So they do everything possible they can to avoid having to talk to you: Matt Cutts calls these "scalable communication approaches", but when my business got essentially mothballed during busy season they felt a lot more like "You're making me click through five different screens to find the contact link and then limiting my message to 250 characters, come on guys, why don't you just write Eff Off And Die so I won't waste any time hoping for a resolution."
On submitting that message to support, I got back an autogenerated reply which was utterly non-responsive. From Google's perspective, I think we were done. Further support requests were did not succeed in reaching anyone who knew what was happening.
The problem was eventually resolved a week later -- after I had complained about it on my blog. I have no knowledge of whether complaining was causationally related to resolution but on previous incidents with Amy Hoy's Google Checkout account and at least three others I can think of off the top of my head, causing a PR issue was the only way to get attention to utterly routine issues.
In addition to these issues, the few beleaguered humans working in the borg tasked with dealing with customers are unaware of Google's own policies, ignorant of most of the information of key importance to their customers (or they hide their knowledge very well), and discouragingly forgetful of promises such as "I will escalate this and someone will get back to you."
One of my other minor frustrations: Google will hold your ad for review if it is possibly objectionable. For example, involving gambling products. I do not actually sell a gambling product, but I've had ads held for weeks or months waiting for review because I tend to use the word "bingo" a lot.
The last time I complained about this on HN, a helpful chap from a foreign Google office emailed me to give me some suggestions, saying that essentially I was likely to fall through the algorithmic crack every single time and that in addition to putting my ad through on the web interface I should immediately open a ticket asking them to review it. This answer makes him the most helpful Google employee I have ever even heard about.
I actually tweeted early today that I edited an ad yesterday and was pleasantly surprised that it was actually published. It has been several months since I've worked with AdWords actively because it is so frustrating.
Full disclosure: I am an AdWords case study.
It lets you intercept and modify request headers on the fly too. Very useful tool.
The problem here is - or rather was - that duckduckgo is differentiating itself from other search engines in a number of ways, and one of the more important ways in which this is done is that at duckduckgo.com you can search for things in the knowledge that they take your privacy seriously and that they will not sell your soul to their highest bidder.
On top of that they try to limit inadvertent exposure of your private information to third parties.
And that's where the problem came from, if you state loud and clear that you are secure, and then you're found to be insecure you have an immediate problem.
So, since duckduckgo.com is setting itself apart from the 'pack' by providing this useful feature and because it is part of their image of being trustworthy they had to address it.
If browser manufacturers would think a bit they would drop the 'Referer' header on https requests, but since it's been there for years now you can expect it to be there for years to come, to step forward and fix it was the right thing to do, and I'm very impressed with the way Gabriel responded to the publicity around the issue and how quick and thoroughly he fixed it.
I wished all companies would be that professional in their dealings with the public.
To add it to the address bar, type about:config into the address bar, search for keyword.url and then change it to http://duckduckgo.com/?q= (or https://duckduckgo.com/?q= for SSL).
Add it to the search bar
In the search bar dropdown, click "Manage search engines"
Select DDG and set a keyword. I use "d".
Then, search using e.g. "d Hacker News"
:dialog searchanginesActually, it's much simpler than that: just right click on the search field and choose "Add a Keyword for this Search…".
I also use Vimperator, and have a DDG keyword search.
Fantastic work, a case study in dealing with problems in a product.
If there was a prize for stuff like this you ought to get it :)
So, Gabriel, if you woke up tomorrow as your Evil twin, you could do click tracking with no further user-visible change of behavior.
Google used to do stealth click tracking via javascript. I have not kept up with whether they still do, but it was that kind of thing that influenced me to switch to DDG.
http://junk.wehrenberg.us/t1.html
EDIT: Apparently both FF and IE work fine if you redirect using a meta refresh rather than js from inside the iframe. But that doesn't give you any way to bust out of the iframe.
I found kd=-1 on the params page but that parameter is gone as soon as I enter a new search term.
You can set the setting indefinitely on the settings page (http://duckduckgo.com/settings.html). To use the URL params to do so, you can add that param to your search bar settings.
The parameters are not "transfered" to another DDG page for me. Eg I manually crafted http://duckduckgo.com/?kf=-1&kz=-1&kd=-1&q=hello... which works great but if I now enter "hello epi0Bauqu" at the site and hit Enter I end up at http://duckduckgo.com/?q=hello+epi0Bauqu&v=
I have cookies disabled, referrers too.
Let me try and understand the params issue because I think that will fix it for you. So why aren't you creating a custom search in opera with those parameters that you one?
Or are you saying that once you do a search and use the search box again, your parameters should be present in that second search? I think you're right that they are not and they should be. I can fix this, but I want to understand exactly what is going on first.
Ah, sorry, I thought I explained it good enough, German here. I made a custom search with those parameters. It works fine. But if I then enter a new search term on the website's search box itself, not through my custom search, the parameters are dropped. That also happens if I reach a site where I have to choose the category and then get to a result page for that specific category, for example if I search for "test": http://duckduckgo.com/?kf=-1&kz=-1&kd=-1&q=test
Then I have to choose a category, I click on http://duckduckgo.com/Test_(student_assessment) and there the parameters are gone.
You've obviously missed a lot of previous HN posts related to the privacy features of DDG, multiple posts from Gabriel's blog concerning the search engine, testimonials from people who have tried DDG for a week and never looked back. Let's just say you're missing a lot.