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Comment by dabbernaught420 | Hacker News Reader

In my view, anyone who trusts ddg is a bit silly - founder has a bad track record on user privacy. Founded Names Database[1], a social media website designed to collect user information as aggressively as possible, before selling all the information to classmates.com.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_Database

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Also worth mentioning they're closed-source, US-based and for-profit. Why exactly do people trust them? Simply because they write a few articles/ads saying "privacy is important"?

If you're willing to sacrifice search quality for privacy, as in switching from Google to DuckDuckGo, then you might as well take a step further and switch from Google to Searx/Ask.Moe.

As a DDG user I don't feel like I'm sacrificing anything. Two sets of results are better than one (I can see Google results by adding !g, which I do less than once per day on average) and, ironically, DDG bangs are the easiest way to use even Google services like Translate and Scholar.

Same for me. Privacy is why I came, bangs are the reason I stay.

Ask.Moe also support bangs (I know !g and !gt works, not sure about scholar). Searx doesn’t but I imagine they’d gladly accept a pull request for it.

I don't know much about those search engines. What's the advantage of Ask.Moe or Searx?

For me the fact that they’re open source. This thread is a prime example of why it’s so important. We really have no idea what DuckDuckGo is doing because they’re closed source. For all we know they could be forwarding users’ IP to Microsoft/Yandex/etc.

If you want to market yourself as a champion of privacy, then the absolute minimum criteria should in my opinion be that your codebase is open source.

> Why exactly do people trust them?

Because they have a good privacy policy. They would face legal consequences if they were lying. Nation state actors can presumably override privacy polices but it's better than nothing.

The reason I use them is not because I trust them but because they do not put me in my own search bubble like Google does. I hate that part of using Google. Also as a bonus I do not get any AMP results.

Never heard of searx .. attempted to use it.

I couldn't figure out which searx instance to use and found no good way of knowing who to trust, most of the engines i used were broken and telling me to find another searx engine.

It looks like it's pulling most of its info from duckduckgo anyway.

Personally I'd rather trust a known entity than an unknown entity anyday, especially when the unknown entity is slow, complicated, buggy and broken in many places.

They’re pulling info from all the other search engines, not just DuckDuckGo. FYI DuckDuckGo is also pulling their results from other search engines, the only difference is that DuckDuckGo aren’t being blocked/rate-limited by them, presumably because they’re paying for API access.

If you hosted your own instance then it would be a lot more reliable since the IP wouldn’t send a suspiciously high amount of requests.

As for your trust argument, I couldn’t disagree more. You choose to trust DuckDuckGo, who happens to be closed source, because of their branding. The same way people trust/trusted Google/Apple/etc. because of theirs. This thread is a perfect example why being open source is the most important thing for any privacy service (because otherwise this privacy leak likely wouldn’t have been discovered, and people wouldn’t have known that the company so carelessly violate people’s privacy and fail to correct it when people point it out.. it should really make you wonder what’s happening in the search engines codebase).

most of us use it because we like ducks

Still a better track record than Google, so...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

I don't really think is an ad hominem fallacy. An ad homihem fallacy is when you attack the person making an argument rather than the argument. But no one here is attacking the people making the argument.

The argument is "Trust DDG". That argument is being attacked as "DDG's founder has done bad stuff in the past, it's likely DDG will do bad stuff, so I won't trust it". That seems to be attacking the argument to me, thus not an ad hominem.

I'm fairly sure that "[you are] a bit silly" is the ad hominem attack, not that calling out the founder is an ad hominem attack.

That’s not an ad hominem attack. The comment didn’t say that the person’s argument is wrong because that person is silly. Clearly the comment is saying that the argument itself is silly.

The intent of the comment was probably not ad hominem, as if it were rephrased like "trusting ddg is silly" because then silly is modifying the act of trusting. But as-written, silly is modifying anyone (a person) without distinguishing whether silliness is the cause or the effect; if silliness is the cause of the trust then it's an ad hominem attack. It would be more clear-cut if instead of "silly" they said "low intelligence."

I meant my comment to read like this:

[My opinion on trusting DDG] - [Reason for my opinion on trusting DDG].[More information about the reason]

In this case, because I don't use the "personal attack" to reach my conclusion that the person was wrong, I don't think it would be a case of argument ad hominem.

But if someone read it like this:

[One reason for my opinion on trusting DDG] - [Another reason for my opinion on trusting DDG].[More information about the second reason]

Then I am using the "personal attack" to reach my conclusion that the person was wrong, so I think it would be a case of argument ad hominem.

My comment wasn't written very well, and I'll try to write better comments in the future. Not that adding an ad hominem to a valid argument makes it invalid, I guess?. But it's still good to avoid fallacies, and to write one's comments so they're likely to be understood the way one meant them.

Ok, but that's pretty irrelevant to the core of dabbernaught420's argument. Focusing on that is kind of pointless.

A common fallacy I see, though I don't know if there's a name for it, is assuming that just because what someone is doing can be described by the name of a fallacy that what the person is doing is fallacious.

> Argument from fallacy is the formal fallacy of analyzing an argument and inferring that, since it contains a fallacy, its conclusion must be false. It is also called argument to logic (argumentum ad logicam), the fallacy fallacy, the fallacist's fallacy, and the bad reasons fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy

I'm talking about situations where no fallacy has actually occurred, not situations where a fallacy has occurred but a correct conclusion has been arrived at anyway.

That’d be a form of equivocation: the accuser is using an incorrect definition of the fallacy, instead of the true one.

I see what you mean. Just because you’re saying a person has a bad history doesn’t mean your committing an “ad hominem”. That seems different.

So what does any fallacy tell me then? Especially the fallacy fallacy? If it does invalidate the invalidation of fallacies it is in itself untrue...bz...recursion error..bz stack overflow

It's unironically called the fallacy fallacy.

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