Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo
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Reddit (and Stack Exchange) pages are what I use most to find honest discussions about some topic. Very convenient to use those results to filter through the blogspam.
Reddit's AMP pages are especially bad, with multiple annoying pop-ups that don't get cookied when you dismiss them on AMP. I don't understand what Reddit is getting out of the deal... their mobile site is equally as "mobile" as the AMP page. The AMP experience is so bad.
No preference to un-AMP yourself on Google. So, I switched my search engine. The DDG results seem significantly worse, or at least very different. But old.reddit.com pages load perfectly, and fast.
Reddit's money grabs piss me off.
To bootstrap the thing I'd crawl Reddit and copy threads, users, subreddits, comments - everything. Users could prove account ownership or create any account that wasn't already allocated. If Reddit sues, they'd face backlash. Comments all used to be GFDL (then Creative Commons) anyway.
Once they can get 3rd party usage below a certain threshold of engagement, they'll block the API.
TBH if they block third party I'm done with them. Def won't be accepting the default user experience.
And also, they'll get third party usage below a certain threshold if people don't use it so... Don't help them!
The risk that any app will, now or in the future, be hacked, sold or just changed to suck all the data from your phone and send it somewhere you don't want it sent is too high for my taste.
Already exists and made by one of the earlier reddit employees: https://tildes.net
Privacy oriented, open source, user funded, focused on quality content, aiming to develop a user-centric moderation system like slashdot and stack exchange that puts moderation into the hands of the people who participate in each individual community.
If you have a reddit account, you can visit /r/tildes and leave a reply in the sticky invite thread to get an invite code within a day. Or, you can send an email to invites@tildes.net to get one.
It's worth noting that Tildes is created and operated by Deimos, the same guy who created reddit's automoderator and subredditsimulator.
Voat is a great place to go for people skeptical about Jews, non-whites, the overweight and transsexuals to freely share their... concerns.
So I don't think software is sufficient to compete, you need heavy community moderation.
Quora is just a broken site right now, mobile or not.
reddit OTOH still seems to work okay on desktop. For a plaintext discussion forum that I prefer to read anonymously, theyve reaaaally screwed the pooch on mobile. I aboid reddit links whenever possible now, which is... sad.
Some of this could of course be related to privacy settings in Firefox.
https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/53q42z/read_redd...
Unfortunately Duck isn’t very good in my country.
But Reddit already has their own mobile site, and app. And half of the appeal of Reddit are the AMP-incompatible features such as voting and commenting! Why do they allow AMP to destroy their website?!
I’m not sure how we ended up with an internet where you need to move through a search engine and two shitty mobile web apps to get to the page you wanted, but here we are.
Given Google's scale they probably don't care about the long tail of technical users such as us.
On iOS (WebKit) and Chrome, Google’s search results can be copied just fine - there’s no redirector because Google uses hyperlink link auditing (<a href="..." ping="...">).
Firefox does support ping but disables it by default for privacy reasons.
Which is good, I guess, because now the link tracking is more apparent, but it does still happen and leads to a worse UX for the user.
> General criticism
AMP has been widely criticized by many in the tech industry[20][21][22][23][24][25][26] for being an attempt by Google to exert its dominance on the Web by dictating how websites are built and monetized, and that "AMP is Google's attempt to lock publishers into its ecosystem".[27] AMP has also been linked to Google's attempt to deprecate URLs so that users will not be able to immediately see whether they are viewing a webpage on the open Web or an AMP page that is hosted on Google's servers.[28]
Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, said: "there is a sense in which AMP is a Google-built version of the web. We are moving from a world where you can put anything on your website to one where you can’t because Google says so."[29] Ramon Tremosa, a Spanish member of the European Parliament, said: "AMP is an example of Google dialing up its anti-competitive practices under the nose of the competition regulators."[29]
Funny thing because I also switched to DuckDuckGo to avoid AMP on mobile and stayed on DDG for years (!g is still needed sometimes unfortunately).
It's a bit annoying to have to zoom in on the results after every search, but that's still less annoying than trying to escape from AMP pages. And, no matter which engine I use, I have to deal with the crappy Reddit redesign - so that's still annoying.
On my desktop systems where I'm not constrained by the walled garden, I have browser extensions to redirect to old.reddit.com (because I don't want to sign in with an account everywhere) - but mostly, I am just looking forward to whatever will replace reddit hopefully some day soon.
I was hoping there was a setting for the results domain that disabled AMP.
I like DuckDuckGo. But unless they build their own search - I think the fundamental problem has not been tackled. There is no good, independent, private search alternative.
[Edit] I am not trying to single out DDG. There are a few replies that either demand for proof (rightfully) or suggest Bing is used only sometimes. I do not have conclusive proof, but have worked on search. Here's a couple of things for the curious:
1. Try to run this test: If you query "what is my ip" in duckduckgo (DDG), or any of the other ones I mentioned, you will notice in the description of one of the top results this IP: 207.46.13.147. It's a BingBot IP [0]. It's a good enough test to spot where results are coming from.
2. Open two browser windows side by side with DDG and Bing. Turn on results for the country you are in in DDG. Look attentively. Try image search.
It is clear that DDG does some re-ranking based on its own, but it's very often the same results.
I don't know a great deal about their infrastructure and would love to learn more about it.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/duckduckgo-anonymous-privacy
Duckduckgo isn't perfect but they're better than google. If I knew of something better than duckduckgo, I'd use that instead. But I'm not going to let perfect be the enemy of good.
IIUC, they have built their own search, but use Bing(among others) for paid ads.
If this is the case, it seems that it’s the business model that needs innovation and not the search engine itself.
It's not mentioned on their site, or their wikipedia entry, or anywhere else I could find, and the results were different when I tried a few searches in them both just now.
Are they "Using Bing" in the same sense they "Use Wikipedia" to put info boxes on the results page sometimes?
As of October 2019, Yahoo! Search is once again “powered by Bing”[2].
To me, results are as crap as Bing's.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/6uaibg/comment/...
SO and the other 400 sources are only used for instant boxes and other widgets. The real organic search results are all from Bing.
> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
I'm not sure where you're getting
> The real organic search results are all from Bing.
That paragraph __DOES NOT__ say that
> more traditional links in the search results
It's super obvious to me what that refers to - the actual search results. The rest is just fluff.
> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/
The results are very similar but not identical to using yahoo or bing.
> it would be wrong to say "Google does similar things"
This does not follow.
It also isn't what I was suggesting, but it would surprise me if Google didn't look at what Bing and Yahoo were doing (and DDG).
Seems doubtful since that would be contrary to DDG's main marketing message and their reason for even existing.
The ToS you are referring to is for companies without custom deals in place.
You can read DuckDuckGo's privacy policy here: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy
It's the only EU-based search engine with its own indexing engine ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant )
I don't care if it's EU or not, but is the index real or kind of half-fake? (like "yes, we have an index, but it's 10MBs big...")
I started using Qwant ~2 months ago and it isn't bad: the snippets that are shown in the search results often don't contain the search terms that I used but the links were so far good - but I did mostly lookups for e.g. functions and other reference data - the few times that I challenged it with exact searches its results were similar to the ones of Google, meaning that it didn't return the websites that contained such exact sequences of characters.
By searching some random words like "when to buy fruitcakes" (without double quotes) I get almost the same listing in Qwant as in Bing. The results are a bit too similar... .
I agree - I admit of having been surprised the first time that it returned "nothing" but in the end I did like the feeling of knowing that it did search what I wanted to search.
> Each of [Bing’s search partners] have to show bing ads, forward the users' IPs as per Bing's terms of service (to fight ad fraud etc).
But DuckDuckGo says:
> [W]e never share any personal information with any of our partners. The way it works is when we call a partner for information, it is proxied through our servers so it stays completely anonymous. That is, any call to a partner looks to the partner as it is from us and not the user itself, and no user personal information is passed in that process (e.g. their IP address). That way we can build our search result pages using these 100s of partner sources, while still keeping them completely anonymous to you.
There isn't going to be, because it's really hard and expensive to do that. I don't see how any startup could even begin to compete with their own search engine.
The barrier to entry is extremely high: Bing probably would not have survived long enough to be profitable if it had been a startup. Microsoft put a lot of money into building it.
Subscriptions and micropayments would not be a solution for DDG because too few people would be willing to pay. Ad revenue is the only model that has sustained search engines in the long term.
I think you're absolutely right that it's not trivial, but it isn't a completely unsolvable problem only addressable by the major spyware corporations like Facebook, Google, etc. I think you could build a decent search engine in about 6-18 months if all living expenses were paid and you could just lock yourself into your apartment with no distractions, with maybe a team of 1-3 other extremely talented engineers.
I tried that, and did not see 207.* anywhere on the page. It displayed my IP address above the results list, and then a list of reasonable results for that query, without any IP addresses listed in any of the descriptions.
https://i.imgur.com/HbhvISk.png
This means DuckDuckGo uses Bing for its results. But it doesn't mean DuckDuckGo is forwarding your IP to Bing.
However I think we need to start asking deeper questions - why is it that concentration is so prevalent in the software industry?
Software is often said to have "natural" monopoly characteristics, but are those characteristics really a product of "nature" in the way that say the laws of physics are, or are they a product of IP laws and the regulatory choices made by the government?
Network effects purely because once you have enough mass of people on board, you can easily attract more people and it is easy enough to distinguish yourself from your competitors that it deters people from switching and/or even being able to make a comparison.
Second you can’t easily steal IP. Anker making a next generation charger will have to face copycats who went to their OEM and were sold the design or the product itself from the backdoor. It’s simply difficult to keep things under wraps when it has a physical + human component. Not so easy in software. To substitute Instagram you’ll probably [0] have to write everything from scratch. Computers when configured correctly will not exactly sell your work from the back door.
[0] I mean source code is still stolen but it’s still marginally harder to use source code than just selling the stolen designs. Plus stealing source code works only once because the victim will then clamp down harder and then continue to innovate it’s way out of the mess.
* DuckDuckGo could be saying "We have a client from Kyrgyzstan, please give us an ad". Bing could be saying: Here is the heading, the body, and the URL. DDG could be dumping that in the page. Your privacy is not compromised.
* DuckDuckGo could be saying "We have a client from Kyrgyzstan and a client from Brazil and a client from Texas searching for 'plastic sponge bathtub' or 'green sponge bathtub' or 'green sponge beach'" in response to a search for "green sponge beach" from a Brazilian. Bing could be responding with several answers. DuckDuckGo would then send the relevant answer to the client.
* If you click on an ad, you have no privacy, end of story.
I'm a StartPage user, but decided to try DDG for some time after the System1 debacle [1]. The Swedish localized search results are downright unusable compared to StartPage/Google. I'm really trying to give it a chance, but I keep reaching for SP in every other search.
[1] https://reclaimthenet.org/startpage-buyout-ad-tech-company/
The thing that's saddest is not only are DDG results not as smart but they also seem dumbed-down in the fashion of Google - ie, too much "your search" --> "what we imagine you really want" --> "here's our curated list of things like this (and screw your actual keywords)"
Eg, Reddit, forums, stack overflow (sometimes), YouTube, etc
I’m either searching for something straight forward and Wikipedia (or some other obvious site) suffices or its so niche that neither Google or DDG work.
I also wrote my own search engine that works well for my niche topics (better than either IMO). Mostly for discovering interesting aspect though.
My guess is that you more frequently search for things in the fallback category compared to users that find DDG's results to be non-crap.
Swedish non-localizes search almost certainly falls in that category.
The bang operator is pretty amazing once you get used to it. It gives you control over what you're searching for again.
I use !w (Wikipedia) !yt (YouTube) !d (dictionary) !rhyme (rhyming dictionary) and !gsc (Google scholar) regularly.
I find Google better at some results -- occasionally Google "gets" what I'm trying to search for better than DuckDuckGo does and zeroes in more specifically on the topic. Sometimes I find that DuckDuckGo does the same. I particularly think that DuckDuckGo's smart cards are just (to me) obviously better than Google's. DuckDuckGo's news is really bad for me, I guess -- I pretty much always use Google News for current events.
This comes up pretty much every time that DuckDuckGo comes up, and I have seen it come up so often, that when I step back and try to come up with a semi-impartial reading of which engine is better, the only conclusion I can reach is that a lot of people have different opinions about how a search engine should react when they search. I think different search results are an acquired taste, and there just isn't an objective right or wrong answer to which engine is better.
So it's a little like if someone was recommending eating vegetables, and you asked, "but what do you do about the crap taste of spinach?" You have a real problem in that I want to help you find foods you like, but at the same time, I'm not trying to "solve" the way spinach tastes. I don't agree that spinach is "wrong", it's just not what you want.
From that point of view, having multiple, diverse search engines is good, and we'd all be served better by using multiple search engines. I don't want DuckDuckGo to just be a Google clone; part of the reason I use it is because of their different results. I do want it to improve and get better, but I disagree that morphing into Google 2.0 will accomplish that for me.
If you like Google's style of search results, then what you really need is a trustworthy replacement for Startpage. You need Google but without the tracking -- and DuckDuckGo isn't just Google without the tracking. I think you're justified in telling anyone who says, "just use DuckDuckGo" to shove off, since DuckDuckGo isn't solving your problem. But I don't agree that DuckDuckGo has bad results, it has a different flavor than you're used to.
I haven't kept up with the most recent news, but I assume OP would still be using SP if they could trust it not to track them. What they need is a StartPage equivalent that they still trust.
There are 2 cases when I need to use !g, both of them are when there aren’t many results:
1. Rare error, simply not in their index
2. Ambiguous term and I need to force a part of the query to appear. Because DDG thinks it’s perfectly fine to ignore the user sometimes and show you completely unrelated things even if you tried your best to tell them what you are looking for and it’s in their index.
Sadly recently google started doing that as well. Not as bad as DDG, the first few results are still an answer to my query, but then they decide to spam the results with useless sites that don’t have the term.
edit: formatting
Here's my last significant Google search: "monaco IndentAction.Indent"
The documentation I was looking for[0] was the:
- 1st hit on Google[1]
- 17th hit on DDG[2]
but to be fair I didn't find it within the first 10 (!) pages of Bing[3], so at least it's better than Bing. And I work for MSFT. I submitted feedback to DDG & Bing, hopefully it helps.
[0] https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/api/enums/monaco.l...
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=monaco+IndentAction.Indent&o...
[2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=monaco+IndentAction.Indent&t=h_&ia...
[3] https://www.bing.com/search?q=%2bmonaco+IndentAction.Indent&...
Are they really competitors?
For instance, I've recently noticed videos being recommended on my Android TV which are particularly related to, or the exactly the same as, those I watched recently on my computer (all done in private mode, no Google login anywhere). This has happened twice after resetting everything. It therefore appears that, contrary to their statements on tracking IP addresses, they're infact using them for recommendations and tracking. We can only imagine what else they are collecting behind the facade of SVs slef-conceited "liberalism".
AIUI duck.com used to be a redirect-- to google.com. Very confusing for actual DDG users. IIRC Google got the domain as part of acquiring On2, some sort of video codec company, at a time when DDG wasn't nearly as popular as it is today.
And so far it's just fine. Gives me great results when searching for coding stuff.
Surprised to find lately that a lot of my searches only return relevant results in a twitter search.
The bang commands are super useful.
A few of my favorites include hn for HN's algolia, th for thesaurus, wes for Wikipedia in Spanish and d for... duck duck go.
And as I switch machines, browsers, profiles, and privacy mode all day long the only ubuiqitous thing is that ddg is the default search engine.
I don't use the !w shortcut as usually whatever/whomever I have searched for is in the info box on ddg's right-hand column and it usually has a wikipedia link if I need to get more detail.
I gave another try to DDG since about 3 weeks and so far the results are pretty good. Not only they got better on the last few years, but for me Google got worse at the same time.
Almost everytime I search in Google nowadays, I have to reformulate my search 2~3 times to get decent results. I often need to add double quotes, ask for reddit or specify the language. Google today just tries too much to read my mind, guess what I want and make interpretations instead of just doing what I asked. Because of this huge waste of time, I became frustrated over time.
Also, I am French, use English very often (including at work) and live in Japan, so the explicit region filter of DDG is really a bless compared to the obscure and almost always wrong way Google handles this.
But what if said things change to the point that they're unrecognisable? What if said spouse cheats you? Because that's what's happening.
From https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95464?co=GENIE.Plat... :
> - Chrome won't save your browsing history, cookies and site data, or information entered in forms. > - Files you download and bookmarks you create will be kept. >- Your activity isn’t hidden from websites you visit, your employer or school, or your internet service provider.
Your IP, referrers etc are still visible. The only thing is you're perhaps not logged in. It doesn't do much to protect you at all.
Also, the ability to identity a given user allows Google to serve personalized and therefore more relevant search results (which of course means you also get personalized ads).
It leads to a chrome extension page asking me to give complete read access to what pages I visit to the DDG extension.
Naive question : how can I know what DDG will do with that data ? (And yes I realize that this question applies to any search engine or extension)
Just from a privacy stand point, extensions with complete access freak me out.
Weirdly you seem to have to go through BingYahoo - https://www.shivarweb.com/9242/how-to-advertise-on-duckduckg...
I'm glad I was relieved of hating @jack at least momentarily. :')
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/21/sacha-baron-cohen-rips-on-fa...
> Sacha Baron Cohen is the well-deserved recipient of ADL’s International Leadership Award, which goes to exceptional individuals who combine professional success with a profound personal commitment to community involvement and to crossing borders and barriers with a message of diversity and equal opportunity.
“I hate this guy because some guy told me to, and I trust that guy because someone else I trust told me to.”
> "Just imagine what Goebbels [2] could have done with Facebook"
I think the bottom line is he is good at social engineering, and he recognizes the signs of manipulation at scale. Beyond that, he is smart enough to consume the literature.
Note: Video is his award speech from ADL. But has sensitive wording and is NSFW. I found it to be pretty well put together - maybe reaching a bit in parts.
Brands pay a lot of money for influencer endorsements.
Think of his as one and you will see the marketing value of this as it relates to people who want to see privacy issues advanced.
The point is, there's a lot of misinformation trying to sway people to one side or the other, and unless you are someone who has spent a lot of time researching the subject, I'll assume you are just parroting some headline that told you "X is bad".
Who cares what this guy has to say about Facebook? Why does his opinion matters more than mine or yours? I bet he knows even less.
He would not be successful in the world he now demands, and he is not a social expert hes a 'funny' man who spends his time on business deals and movies.
I'm jewish, I don't want him speaking for me. I'd rather sasha cohen be allowed to make offensive films and everyone else too.
He's no more expert than joe rogan or any other comedian.
He's just the one the ADL decided to use as a mouth piece for censorship, and as a jewish person I don't appreciate their pretending to have my best interests in mind while hurting the basic freedoms and ability for self expression of everyone in the country.
He's not brave and there's no king. he was celebrated for his comments. The things he's saying are only the words of a jester because he's a clown, not because they're wise.
He's effectively making the same arguments that FOSTA-SESTA made (which led to the closing of personals sections of Craigslist among other liability-transferring impacts), but for all of social media. His call was for all internet companies to pre-vet every single user-generated-content before anyone else sees it or be held liable for user-submitted content. It likely does solve the problem, but it swings the pendulum _very_ _far_ in the other direction towards corporate censorship and over-censorship to prevent any possibility of liability.
This is late-stage capitalism in action. Companies in the {social media, advertising, sales} space all have utility functions centered around attacking the weaknesses of the human mind. It just so happens that governments and political parties are in the same industry using the same tactics.
I just don't see SBC's prescription working in a country with a constitutionally mandated Freedom of Speech (where the jurisprudence only disallows speech if it is a direct and specific call to action of violence). And it it does, Newspeak will be the only language supported on the platform.
Hello, 1990's Slashdot called and would like its tired old '$' satire back.
It's reputation they fully earned. You can write "Microsoft" in full whenever you like if you prefer too. I think it's pretty reasonable to casually express contempt at every opportunity for any business that puts money vastly further ahead of ethics than they need to. You can disgaree with that if you like too.
Facebrick is the new M$. What do we have for Goog? "do no evil" with strickeout for more money? $GOOG?
1. "fix incorrect mayonese".
2. "fix incorrect lazagna"
and compare with:
1. "fix incorrect mayonnaise".
2. "fix incorrect lasagna"
What does that mean? I guess https://duckduckgo.com/app is a browser, and a browser extension? The app is a relatively better browser than DDG search is a search engine?
Honestly, IDK why anyone would not just use Firefox Mobile. It's got addons support too
I applaud these moves.