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Comment by blululu | Hacker News Reader

Something that doesn't sit well with me about DuckDuckGo is their hidden use of affiliate links to Amazon and eBay. Fundamentally search engines are vulnerable to predatory business models. Privacy is one issue. Providing financially motivated information is another. To my knowledge (would love to hear more), Google is pretty up front about what is an ad and what isn't while DuckDuckGo covertly sells you to Amazon when you might want to buy something.

While DuckDuckGo seems to be enjoying some halo effect in some communities at the moment (Google once enjoyed a similar glow), I think that general skepticism is probably a healthy orientation toward search engines.

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Hi blululu,

You'll notice when you search for an item like "Airpods" the shopping instant answer appears including products from Amazon.

The top right of that placement (https://i.imgur.com/EIpFjVR.png) you'll see it is noted that this is an ad. These links are eligible for affiliate commission as outlined in our help pages (https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/ad...). Even in this situation, no personally identifiable information is shared with Amazon.

Amazon links that appear in the organic results are not affiliated.

eBay links that appear in the organic results may be affiliated. As per our policy, this has no impact on their organic ranking or appearance - and no information is shared with eBay.

We agree that general skepticism is healthy, and try to make clear that any element which has its placement changed, or elevated because of a financial incentive is labelled as an ad.

If there is something unclear about that, we'd always love to hear more user feedback!

Fair - I had not noticed the ad labels before. Thanks for the response. Putting the label in the top right corner instead of the bottom left does feel like a bit of a dark pattern. DuckDuckGo's page layout clearly reflects the classic F pattern of visual attention, and the ad label is not very prominent.

I don't know what you intend "hidden" to mean, but they're not lying about it:

> DuckDuckGo is part of the affiliate programs of the eCommerce websites Amazon and eBay. When you visit those sites through DuckDuckGo, including when using !bangs, and subsequently make a purchase, we receive a small commission.

> This mechanism operates anonymously and there is no personally identifiable information exchanged between us and Amazon or eBay. These links are regular organic links (like any other link in our results) and these programs do not influence our ranking or relevancy functions in any way. That is, they are not advertising like paid placements or paid inclusions, and we only generate revenue from them if you ultimately find them relevant enough to end up purchasing an item.

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/ad...

Qwant does this, too.

As long as they don't alter the search results to give those links an advantage, I have no problem with them using affiliate links. It makes them money to absolutely no loss to me, right?

If for convenience I search for "Amazon product X" on my browser bar instead of directly on Amazon, that means that in order for Amazon to generate a certain amount of profit on that product they also have to pay my search engine now, which means all other things equal, this costs me money.

Of course in real life it's not that simple a situation but it's easy to see that everyone behaving like this ends up with the consumer essentially losing money.

>they also have to pay my search engine now, which means all other things equal, this costs me money.

Most customer focused companies could save a pretty sum of money by not advertising. Of cause it may hurt overall sales to not advertise.

From what I understand, affiliate links pay out only when you buy something. Traditionally, this was taken from the seller's margin and the price of the product was not increased, as the higher volume of sales made up multiple times for the loss from commissions.

But since Amazon gets nothing from the "passive" affiliate links (ones that don't increase volume), DDG might be big enough to make them have to compensate. Would be interesting to see the numbers for this...

The price on Amazon is based on what the market will pay. If they could charge more, they would do so.

The only one losing money is Jeff Bezos.

IMO there is a privacy loss to you. Amazon should not get to know what search engine you use.

They just see your referrer anyway, doesn’t really matter if they have affiliate tags or not.

That's fair, but the Referrer header already does that. It can be blocked, true, but either way this is just a single literal bit of data - I don't mind, but I see how someone might.

An argument could also be made, that this is beneficial to me, as if Amazon finds a lot of traffic from DDG, they might be more inclined to buy ad space with them, giving better funding to a service I like.

The HTTP Referer header is a horrible bug that should never have been part of the web IMO. When I tell laypeople that this happens they're often very surprised.

I'm more than fine with this approach (assuming you're made aware of it being an affiliate link), especially when the alternative is giving up my privacy to a glorified advertising company.

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