Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

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Prefer DuckDuckGo for searching, if possible. If you don't like DuckDuckGo's results and can't tolerate them, then prefer Startpage to Google, which will give you the same algorithm minus tracking/customization. Even post-acquisition, Startpage is still a more privacy-conscious engine than Google, and their ads are better labeled.

And while I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, quick reminder that unless you're running Lynx or some crap, literally everyone on this blog should have an adblocker installed (preferably uBlock Origin).

I appreciate there are multiple perspectives people have on whether adblocking should be a scorched-earth policy, or whether it's better to just target the worst actors. But disguising ads as native content is abusive enough behavior that you should be blocking those ads no matter where you fall on that spectrum -- and the UI changes here are very clearly, very obviously meant to make ads blend in with normal page results. The 'ad' indicator is meant to look like just another favicon.

I'm seeing people here suggest greaseMonkey scripts, and maybe there's something I'm missing, but I just really don't understand that. Don't restyle the ads, block them! Block advertisers that are abusive.

I like DDG, but have been using Ecosia for the past 6 months or so. I like that I've contributed to planting 25 trees (by the averages) just in my normal course of searching.

Ecosia serves Bing results (iirc). The search result quality is awful.

DDG also uses Bing. I've never used Ecosia before, but it's interesting to me that the experience would be so dramatically different when they're both using the same source. Must be some interesting factors involved in DDG's search to assist in pulling more relevant results out of Bing.

DDG isn't just a skin over bing. I heard it consumes multiple sources and applies its own ordering rules.

I do not know about Ecosia, but DDG does not use only Bing. According to Wikipedia, it uses over 400 different sources. So in theory, given they have a smart enough algorithm, DDG should be able to produce better results than Bing.

Pretty sure the search results are from Bing, while those other 399 sources are for other things, like quick answers, dictionaries, translations, currency conversion, flight search, etc.

It's Bing. I've noticed the slightly lower quality.

It's something of a conscious choice: unfettered tracking and advertising practices but good search results, or less tracking and OK results with profits used for a cause.

Startpage is now owned by an advertising company.[Y]

[Y] https://www.startpage.com/blog/company-updates/startpage-and...

Correct, but it's still preferable over Google.

Startpage's parent company is (currently) less integrated with Startpage than Google's Advertising department is with Search. Their search results are also better formatted, and ads are more clearly marked. Startpage also doesn't do link wrapping if you turn off Javascript, which is such a huge privacy win over Google Search that I would still tell you to prefer Startpage even if I knew that they were slurping up other data.

On the marketing side, Startpage's parent company also doesn't own the vast majority of the online ecosystem, and distributing power among multiple advertisers is better than consolidating all of the power behind a single company who also owns a dominant web browser. System1, for all of its faults, isn't actively proposing web standards with the goal of deprecating URLs.

If you can't use DuckDuckGo, you should still prefer Startpage to Google. Google Search is also owned by an advertising company, one that openly mines literally every single data point of every single search they do. You can't get worse than that. I see people who are saying they want to break free of Google, but that they can't give up Google's results. I'm not going to tell them to stick with Google if an almost universally better alternative exists.

I really wish discussions would better distinguish between tracking, advertising, and camouflaged advertising.

I actually like advertising as one avenue of finding stuff.

I just hate when tracking is bundled with advertising. And I hate when advertising is camouflaged.

In practical terms:

When I’m searching for guitars, I like seeing both: third party results and ads that are not camouflaged.

I also like seeing guitar ads on a guitar related website.

But I hate seeing guitar ads on an unrelated website, just because I looked at a guitar website a few days ago. And I hate when a guitar ad is camouflaged as an independent review.

An advertising company that doesn’t track or camouflage gets my support. And I just hope that StartPage is and remains that kind of company.

> I just hate when tracking is bundled with advertising. And I hate when advertising is camouflaged.

AFAIK pretty much all customers that pay for internet advertising WANT tracking (a cookie or URL session ID that tracks you from the advertising platform to the advertised site destination) as a way to verify that their money is actually producing results, otherwise they have little way of knowing that.

Greasemonkey could also be used to remove the adds not just restyle them.

I guess, but what would be the point? Are there really people who are fine blocking ads on Google, but are not OK just letting Gorhill/EasyList handle the implementation?

Bear in mind, there are a lot of other sites beyond just Google where you should probably be blocking ads. Do you really want to deal with the performance/maintenance costs of Greasemonkey on every one of them? Just install an adblocker already and be done with it.

I guess I would be one of those people - my reasoning being that I don't mind ads that much but in this case the google changes are pissing me off. Many media organizations are not doing to well, the do ads which is maybe not smart but that's how they pay for it. Google is doing very well, what they have already pays their bills and makes them rich, but they want to lessen the experience of their users to get richer.

So in this one case I'm the kind of guy who would like to block ads on Google and nowhere else currently. (Also if I install an ad-blocker I am at the mercy of the ad-blocker not reaching a deal with one of the richest companies in the world to let their content through because it's ok)

I like duckduck, but their ads are even more intrusive than the Google ones. Since Duckduckgo puts the (Ad) symbol at the end of the title rather than the beginning, they are not lined up and so much harder to quickly scan and ignore.

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