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Comment by crocodiletears | Hacker News Reader

At some point, we're going to cut the branding middle-man, and put Bing on the front page of HN as a viable alternative to Google Search.

Not as sexy as the high-minded front organizations that reskin it, but it'd be nice if we could be honest with ourselves about the beasts we were feeding.

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Is that meant to imply that the privacy protection and un-bubbling of the "middle men" is bogus? (I don't know about Qwant, but DDG isn't solely Bing, and it feeds some worthwhile organizations with donations.)

I think DDG is more of a legitimate competitor in the search space than other engines running off the Bing index. My understanding is that they've been pretty transparent about using Bing and Yandex as sources for its product, have done quite a bit of work to tailor the results they spit back, and maintain their own knowledge graph for features like instant answers. They seem to function more as a metasearch engine.

From ehat I've seen, search engines like Ecosia and Qwant aren't very clear about what they bring to the table, beyond serving as a proxy for Bing that doesn't store as much data on you.

I don't think there's anything explicitly wrong with that. But I don't think they really merit anybody's attention either. Especially since they don't explicitly advertise what they are.

Ecosia explicitly specifies "Results from Microsoft" on every results page, so they seem pretty transparent there. I don't think DuckDuckGo and Qwant are as upfront about that.

They are about Yandex results. I always get a note when searching cyrillic content.

I think you can add +g to make DDG display Google results instead. But yes, it is not documented that well.

Are you referring to adding !g ? This redirects to Google but AFAIK there is no way to get Google results on a DDG-branded page.

Why are so many search engines trying to piggy back off other search engines? Can they not crawl sites themselves and cut out the extra layer? In a sea of bad websites I feel like if you started with a whitelist approach it could be a good basis.

Crawling is difficult these days as recaptcha and other measures keep bots out if you are not google or MS

That is quite unfortunate. How the hell are new original search engines supposed to compete?

I’ve worked in this space for over two years. They can’t. It’s simply not possible. The only feature that’s feasible to offer is privacy. You’ll never be able to catch up to Google or Bing with crawling.

In your opinion, do you think a new original search engine can survive in this landscape? Of course it would always be behind Google and Bing by about 15 years.

I've been reseasrching some ideas.

It's a pretty herculean task, moreso no than ever before. On top of the sheer volume of the internet, and the technical challenges of performant search, many sites are hostile to unknown scrapers, and automation.

Qwant is a completely independent search engine though, as far as I'm aware it's not using Bing underneath the hood anymore

Where are you getting that from?

The English Wikipedia page uses the past tense so I assumed that wasn't the case.

But reading the French version of Wikipedia (I happen to be French) and the conclusion is much more tenuous. So I guess I'm wrong!

Even all they did was be a private middleman that would still be useful.

That’s assuming that the users’ goal is to avoid be tracked rather than just replacing Google with Microsoft.

If Bing themselves wanted to get on the HN first page all they have to do is go all in on privacy.

I just did a search on our business and the results were not the same, just like DDG and Bing isn't the same. From best to worst result on the same search string:

Google > Startpage > Qwant > Bing > DDG

But even if they were 100% identical, it has some privacy unlike 3 out of the other 4.

If I am not mistaken, only Startpage and DDG will allow HTTP POST instead of GET.

Startpage.com's new owner makes it less private than doing a search on Facebook while logged into your Google Chrome account.

What is a "Chrome account"? Web browsers ask users to "sign-up" now? For what?

To sync with your other devices. You keep your extensions, history, bookmarks, etc... It acts as a backup.

To mine even more of your personal data.

They give you cloud sync functionality in return.

Whether your business appears good on search results is a highly subjective indicator of quality though.

If the name is quite unique it's a good indicator because some site with high pagerank and lot of seo that list other websites/companies/software are sometime higher than the original site (stackshare.io or alternativeto.net for example)

I use Bing (and Edge, and Windows 10...) but for the average HN reader that's not cool enough. Tech is more and more about personal branding and following the hype train. DDG is in. Bing is not.

Also, for the older crowd who came from slashdot (and still says 'Micro$oft') it'd be morally unacceptable to use Bing directly. They prefer either a rebrand, or to directly give all their data to Google (maybe because they still see it as fresh and new?)

So close, but no cigar.

DDG isn't just a rebrand of Bing (and wouldn't be even if they did all searches via Bing); they don't pass personal information along to Bing that would allow Microsoft to track the user.

Do you really think that makes any serious difference if the sites you're visiting serves google ad or uses google analytics?

You think you are doing something, but I have strong reservations it achieves anything except making you feel better and more in control.

> Do you really think that makes any serious difference if the sites you're visiting serves google ad or uses google analytics?

Yes, if you block those. You're also not in a search bubble.

We don’t know that. I mean all they have to show for it is a privacy policy and a few articles saying “we value privacy”. If they truly cared about privacy then why wouldn’t they be open source?

I feel DDG can be compared to Apple in many ways, but here’s it’s important to look at what Apple is doing to its Chinese users by letting the CCP spy on all their iCloud data (sacrifice all the privacy values to obtain access to China’s market). Perhaps DuckDuckGo have also been forced to sacrifice their users’ privacy to join Microsoft Advertising as well? It’s difficult to tell since they’re closed source, and Microsoft Advertising is a private ad network (anyone besides DDG/Ecosia that’s been invited?) that doesn’t make any API documentation publicly available. At least with Bing’s API we can tell that Microsoft just need the search query for it to work, but how about their Microsoft’s advertising API?

So just like Qwant except no ties to the US.

For now, the french Qwant has as litle ties to the US as the swiss Crypto AG had a few years ago.

But since that country is part of 9-eyes IIRC, I wouldn't place a lot of faith on that

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