Is DuckDuckGo, DuckDuckDone? | Hacker News Reader

Is DuckDuckGo, DuckDuckDone?

kevq.uk

65 pointstaubek96 comments

The article is a little disingenuous. DDG didn't do this in secret and no one "found out". They announced it...

Discussed at length here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31490515

Some employee mentioning this on Twitter is not an announcement. That would be a press release, a blog post or at least a tweet from their official corporate account.

I use DDG too but I wish they wouldn't use bing as a backend.

It's hard to tell. Given that DDG signed a confidentially agreement barring discussion, the "employee mentioning on twitter" might have been the only feasible way to get the information out.

That said, this has been going on a while, and it seems more likely that DDG was fine with keeping it secret and the employee was probably acting independently.

I think the fact the DDG signed the confidentiality agreement willingly does not speak well of their overall priorities.

that screenshot tweet is DDG founder/ceo, so not just “some employee”

agree that official announcement would be better though

And since that post they have added a note to their app info page on Google play (and presumably elsewhere) saying

>Note About our Tracker Blocking: While we block all cross-site (3rd party) cookies on other sites you visit, we cannot block all hidden tracking scripts on non-DuckDuckGo sites for a variety of reasons including: new scripts pop up all the time making them difficult to find, blocking some scripts creates breakage making parts or all of the page unusable, some we are prevented from blocking due to contractual restrictions with Microsoft.

Sure they could have revealed this better, but it doesn't really seem like they were trying to hide it.

> Kagi looks promising, but I feel like $10/m for search is a little steep. But what’s the price of privacy, amirite?

As long as this is our reaction to paying for things - and in this case, if not the thing we derive the most value from on the internet, certainly within the top 3 - we’re going to keep getting screwed by advertisers.

I think it's tricky to a have credit card required for a private search engine unless there's a way to use it without the cc.

Would love your thoughts on our approach: We (you.com founder here) think there should be two modes:

1. personalized mode where you have convenience, personalization (that clearly many people want from Google) and maybe even things like credit cards in the future, localization for directions/restaurants/weather and other useful "search apps". Even then, that mode is much better than Google in that we dont store IP addresses, don't track users across the internet, no targeted ads, etc.

2. hardcore private mode where you can be super private and nothing gets stored/logged/saved, no localization, everything proxied (slightly slower), no credit card needed, etc.

We have those two modes.

What I've seen sometimes is that new smaller private search engines like you.com that have much better privacy than Google get shot down because they still have some analytics etc. and aren't insanely private in all situations, eg. (easy to subscribe to or not)

* doing in-house/on-prem analytics to know if you have bugs and issues in eg your ranker (how else will you ever be independent of Google/Bing and build an actually competitive search engine?)

* trying to provide people with personalization (so they can downvote SEO/ads) - requires a login etc.

The result is that most people (outside HN here) just stick with Google - where they get completely tracked everywhere and for everything.

Sometimes it feels like perfection in privacy is the enemy of progress?

I like the idea of the two modes.

From what I observe, most people don't really care about privacy, but the ones who do can be quite, errr, passionate about it, certainly sometimes to the point that nothing is good enough. So it's a difficult market. I worked at a privacy focused cryptographic startup a few years back. It didn't succeed...

At the end of the day, I think you have to differentiate on the strength of the product itself, with privacy being a very nice thing on top of it to the best extent possible.

VPN services have a similar dilemma - privacy service you pay for. Two solutions I can think of, broadly - first, a standard “we keep as little info as possible” type policy goes a long way. You’re competing with Google, who’s privacy policy is just the laughing emoji, so a real commitment and a policy to back it goes pretty far. Second, this is actually a good use case for crypto, so if you don’t already accept btc, it’s worth considering.

You’re right, though - you’ll never please the hard core tinfoil crowd, but that’s not the whole privacy-interested crowd.

I can't wait for Kagi to start charging me. I've already switched and it's fantastic.

With Netflix letting me down, I'll justify it as a $5.99 savings each month by cancelling one and paying for the other.

What happened with Netflix? Is this about the price hike, or is there some other Thing I'm supposed to be upset about?

Nothing specific. Just the general irritation of cheap, low quality content; shows cancelled before they run their course; etc.

I find myself trying to watch new shows on there, and getting bored halfway through the first episode of some series. I'd pay $5 or $10 a month, but not $16. It ain't that good.

The value of Netflix is small compared to its price - Disney+ is $10 and has a much larger back catalog (if you like the kind of content they have), and Apple TV+ or whatever they call it is only $5).

I have to mention this cliche here (although it's probably already been mentioned): the product, not the customer.

The day I saw this output, I never looked back.

    mtr -t -c 3 -w duckduckgo.com Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev 0.0%     3   56.2  56.5  56.0  57.3   0.7 0.0%     3   56.3  56.8  56.3  57.0   0.4 3   78.4  78.4  78.3  78.5   0.1 0.0%     3   78.2  78.7  78.2  79.3   0.5 0.0%     3   78.5  78.7  78.4  79.0   0.3 0.0%     3  159.7 158.0 136.6 177.7  20.6 0.0%     3   78.4  79.0  78.4  79.7   0.7 3   78.7  78.9  78.5  79.4   0.5 100.0     3    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0 done so in the first place!

I'm not sure what sort of conclusion you're trying to make by looking at traceroute data. Every website hosted on Azure is going to show this similar network path. It's known that DDG uses Azure and other Microsoft services. They also happen to have a contractual agreement to use Bing's search results. That doesn't somehow mean DDG is owned or operated by Microsoft or in any way gathering the same data as if you were to just go to bing.comThis will show you the exact same type of data. Are you saying Southern New Hampshire University is the same as Bing?
mtr -t -c 3 -w snhu.edu
  HOST: mbp                            Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev 0.0%     3   49.2  50.1  46.8  54.3   3.8 0.0%     3   53.4  55.6  52.4  61.0   4.7 0.0%     3   56.5  54.2  51.8  56.5   2.3 0.0%     3   56.3  55.7  50.2  60.7   5.3 0.0%     3   56.9  53.8  49.8  56.9   3.6 100.0     3    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0

> It's known that DDG uses Azure and other Microsoft services.Known to whom? Certainly not to most users who think they're getting privacy from "Big Tech" by using DDG, yet are ironically getting the complete opposite.

That's an incorrect assumption on your part. DDG allows you to execute search queries without associating those queries or results with any of your personally identifiable information or accounts. Its claim is to provide private search.  No part of their mission claims to never use "Big Tech" companies for infrastructure, transport, etc.Again I'll come back to my example. Do you think that SNHU being hosted on Azure means Microsoft just gets free access to all of their grades, research data, user/student/faculty information, PII, logs, to use for their own business purposes? If that's what you believe is happening, then this applies to every company who uses any public cloud provider.
Seriously, I'd love more proof or sources for these claims that Microsoft (or any company) is using its position as a cloud provider to harvest information from private companies. Otherwise it's nothing more than a conspiracy theory driven by traceroute output, thrown together with misinformed news articles about business contracts.

Given that DDG depends on Bing index, it seems reasonable to host it on Microsoft infrastructure. Would you also avoid DDG if it was hosted on public Azure? Is Google Cloud any better?I still see a huge difference between the DDG web page and the Bing web page, different positioning, different defaults, different ads, different approach to engage with the user, different ranking (different search results), different search tools.
Even if at some point DuckDuckGo is acquired by Microsoft, I think the differentiation will be maintained.

So instead you are using Google?...In my experience the Google Search became awful enough around ~2014 so I switched to Bing as a default search provider. I can always search on another provider if I need, but overall Bing was good enough and somewhere around 2018 I moved to DDG, which allows to use '!g' prefix to search in Google.
Sometimes I use that for some obscure results, but it is not that often. And [not] surpisingly enough I have a better experience with IT tech related queries.

Yup this is why I’ve never went to duck duck go and just stuck with Google.

Do you use google only in private browsing mode and via a vpn? Because although DDG are using Bing as a backend, presumably they are not forwarding on cookie data or my ip address to Bing.

> presumably they are not forwarding on cookie data or my ip address to Bing.Why would you presume this? The data is already on their infrastructure - literally on computers owned by Microsoft, who has one of the worst records for privacy.

DuckDuckGo's infrastructure is owned by Microsoft? The servers that serve duckduckgo.com are owned by Microsoft? This is news to me.

Indeed, just dig A/AAAA records for DDG and see for yourself.

> Because although DDG are using Bing as a backend, presumably they are not forwarding on cookie data or my ip address to Bing.Why would anybody default to believing that to be the case?
DuckDuckGo has built their faux privacy-focused search engine on Microsoft's not-privacy-respecting Bing foundation. They use, benefit from and monetize whatever privacy abuses Microsoft have utilized to provide Bing results (to get the data to the point where it's at now). I've never seen any evidence they have qualms with the moral stench of that, of swimming in that sewer.
No, we don't get the oil from Russia, we buy it from a guy that buys it from Russia. Our hands are clean.

The usual rule applies. If a controversial question is in the headline, the answer is almost certainly no.

I recently switched to Kagi (https://kagi.com) and quite like it. I don't have any plans to go back to DDG.

I've been using Kagi for a while. I'm totally on board with springing $10/mo for good search.The biggest thing that worries me about Kagi is that, in order to be using it and paying for it, I have to log in, across all my devices. I'm literally collaborating on the process of someone doing much, much finer-grained and definitive tracking than other search engines currently do.
While Kagi assure me they aren't putting all this information together... I am giving it to them, and that gives me pause.

>  I've been using Kagi for a while. I'm totally on board with springing $10/mo for good search.If privacy is the concern, why not just use a VPN and use Google? Doesn't this achieve the same end, but with a VPN you have far more usecases than just search?
I mean, if you really wanted to take things to the extreme you'd run TOR or use Tails, right? It's not the cost that makes me question this, I pay for a VPN after all, but what does Kagi do to justify itself beyond the 'it's better than google?'

I use a vpn but im logged into gmail and youtube so that kind of defeats the whole vpn thing. Chrome logs itself in if I login to gmail or youtube.There are pretty obvious solutions, don't use chrome use opsec, but google has a lot of power to de-anonymise me and I just want to surf the net without big brother.

Read up on Kagi a bit. You can tailor your results to you. For example, I can rank-adjust any domain and those adjustments are applied to any future searches. I can even block specific domains (like those Stack Overflow clones and the SEO spam sites that plague Google results).

So, a curated Internet? I guess that seems reasonable, filters were always a thing with adblockers, I guess this allows for a all inclusive turn key experience.

You can simply pay $10/month/device to have separate accounts. Privacy is worth it!

I use Kagi as well (and sometimes Andi, but I'm still waiting for their non-Assistant Mode interface to switch as a daily driver) -- I find their quality of results basically equivalent to Google, but without the SEO cruft. In fact it's so uncannily good that I've often wondered if what Kagi is doing is in fact just passing you Google results with the spam removed!Something about DDG/Bing always left me feeling a bit uncomfortable that something was missing from the results, and I have no objective data to back this up, just a general unease that the results weren't as comprehensive as I'd like, which I don't feel with Kagi and Andi.

I was all aboard the DuckDuckGo train until a few weeks ago when they went nuts[0] and went to Google. Not that Google is any better, but if I'm going to get censorship either way I might as well get a decent browsing experience. DuckDuckGo at this point provides 0 value.I haven't had the time to look for something else, I feel like I'll move away from Google in the next few weeks. It's not as easy on iPhones however as Safari forces you into using like ~5 hardcoded search engines and I can't find something to replace Safari with that doesn't suck.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30627892

I think you misunderstand the purpose of a search engine. They would be borderline worthless if they did not make any attempt to sort results by relevance and quality. It is why SEO is such a big industry, because everyone and their mother wants to convince Google that their website is both high quality and highly relevant for a given search term.

Relevance and quality !== political pandering.This is the exact Tweet:
> Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create. #StandWithUkraine
> At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation
How about Chinese disinformation? Saudi disinformation? WaPo/CNN/Fox News disinformation? How about Australian or Indonesian disinformation?
This sort of selective attack is exclusively political and has nothing to do with improving a search experience. It is one thing to downrank spam, it's a whole other thing to down rank things based on the political views of the CEO.

I would hope that they de-prioritize all domains known to be tied to nefarious state-sponsored misinformation. However the fact that you lump in reputable news sources like the Washington Post with Kremlin-sponsored blogspam really hurts your argument that DDG is not playing fair here.

WaPo is reputable to you. Until the DDG CEO decides that it leans too left or that its headlines are too controversial, and because it isn't neutral enough it should be downranked in favor of centrist publications.

For mobile iOS, we've have gotten very positive feedback on the you.com iOS app that's both browser and search: com-search-and-browser/id1600782099" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">https://apps.apple.com/us/app/you-com-search-and-browser/id1...Let me know what you think, we're always trying to improve it and still in beta.

Hi, your FAQ page is difficult to use from within your browser. It also appears like I’m forced to use You as the search engine and can’t change it - is that right?

Thanks for the feedback. We should simplify the mobile FAQ layout to make it easier to read. app supports our search engine. We should allow users to change it. I'll add it to our backlog!

The point of search engines is to rank websites not simply to hold a giant index.As such down-ranking disinformation seems completely appropriate, what exactly is your concern?

DDG's downranking was the result of politics, not of merit or technical reasons. Furthermore, what one person's 'disinformation' is another's lived experience. Hell, it might be the accepted truth tomorrow.

Merit is inherently political. The way you grant it is a function of your politics

"Breaking News: Ukraine ended its “combat mission” in Mariupol and said fighters were being evacuated, signaling that the battle at a steel plant was over." [1] In the article originally linked [2]: "Ukrainian officials said that evacuations from the Azovstal steel factory had begun. The military said that 264 service members, 53 of them “seriously injured,” had been taken by bus to areas controlled by Russian forces."That is how the NYTimes, alongside the rest of the corporate media - in unison, chose to describe the recent mass surrender of thousands of Ukrainian forces in Mauripol where the most intense fighting to date had occurred. That is literal and intentional disinformation intended to mislead readers.
Of course don't expect the corporate media to get down-ranked anytime soon. Because "disinformation" isn't about disinformation, it's about publishing anything that runs contrary to the narrative of the day, a narrative that disturbingly often now ends up being completely false.
[1] - https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1526336507430182912
[2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20220516233043/https://www.nytim...

Not op, but here’s my concerns and suggestions:1. It’s a search engine, not a news aggregator with curated content. If there’s a lot of “disinformation” results on the top so be it, it’s the state of the current information space. Ones goal may be to specifically look for the propaganda articles for curiosity purposes.
2. It probably make sense to use something like google does with pictures - be able to un-filter the “disinformation” links by implicitly allowing it. Maybe marking the results with warning tags/labels would help as well.
3. If there’s such filter exists it would make sense to filter not only the specific country news, but all of them.
4. It’s difficult to me to believe that they are able to do this filtering/downranking right. It’s very difficult task to be objective in absence of trusted sources (except the 2+2=5 situations, probably).

Spoiler, DuckDuckNope it's not

The problem is Google objectively provide better search results. I'm a DDG user as well this is my opinion -- DDG is my chosen default because of their stance on privacy.If it turns out DDG isn't offering much privacy as they claim then back to Google. It's not enough to make me switch right now but I am watching to see where this hockey puck goes.

In my experience whether Google provides better results or not heavily depends on what sort of information you're seeking. Things I used to find easily on Google suffer both from a serious recency effect and are SEO-manipulated half to death. Try finding anything from more than a few years ago, and the first dozen pages are often more recent pages about more recent topics that happen to have some similar words involved but are less topical to the actual search.

my mileage varies...but when ddg's results are useless, it's possible to add !g in any part of the query and it'll redirect (which for some reason forces me to refresh everyonce in a while before google's results appear)

Google's search result quality are taking a nose dive.

For all the ideological schpiel...> Startpage would be the closest, but I really don’t like their purple colour scheme.
That can be solved with a plugin to override the CSS.

I use several search engines, but my primary right now is startpage. It's been ok (If you'd asked me what color the page is I couldn't have told you).

Which one would you suggest ?

https://superuser.com/questions/560539/how-can-i-force-my-cs...

DDG is just a proxy for bing, that's it.Saying DDG is a search engine is like saying instacart is a supermarket.
They are just delivering someone else's business and could disappear overnight if the source decides to disallow them.
Which brings up the question if computing power, storage and bandwidth has never been cheaper, why are Google and Bing the only two major search engines surviving?

why are Google and Bing the only two major search engines surviving? Massively high technical barrier to entry, and in Google's case, bullying the little guy with impunity.

The technical side should have become easier since the inception of Google: you can probably beef up a single machine to index the entirety of relevant internet.

nah, it costs A LOT of money to build an up-to-date index of the web. - one sources/url/app at a time.

Where does your cost come from mostly?

people,machines, crawling, storage, etc.

The growth of the internet may well compensate the decreased pricing of compute.Hosting Google of 1999 is much much cheaper now. But hosting contemporary Google ist much much more expensive than hosting Google of 1999 in 1999.

A lot of the internet is behind semi-walled gardens and GoogleBot and BingBot have preferential access.All the large social sites, Cloudflare, and other CDNs will just stop serving unknown bots after awhile, which is why there are spidering/scraping services that cycle thru IP addresses. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29417061

Sounds like Cloudflare has enough information to become a search engine itself, if it ever wanted to ...

Hm I just tried `!imdb wag the dog` on bing and I didn't end up on imdb.com. Instead I got Microsoft's take on that movie and a bunch of other cruft. If by proxy you mean they use bing's index then yeah I guess they do. If you mean they have the same functionality then no, you're wrong.

Because they're "good enough" and that's all that really matters.To supplant Google you need to be better and that's going to be hard to do (the easiest way is something that Google no doubt blocks - filtering Google results).

>my oldest son says “DuckDuckGo it” instead of “Google it”It though it was supposed to be "Duck it".

He doesn’t want to use Startpage because “I really don’t like their purple colour scheme.” Interesting.In terms of DDG, I wonder if a non-invasive search engine is viable. I can’t think of a company (Apple?) would has the resources to do it.

What a missed opportunity!The title should have been:
> Is DuckDuckGo DuckDuckGone?

What a terrible decision by DDG. That's as generous as I can get regd. this.

This article makes me want to use Brave lol

> Brave search is a possibility, but they’re owned and managed by a homophobic douchebag.Here we go again... He donated a few thousands dollars in 2008 and 2010 to a referendum campaign against same-sex marriage. He then repeatedly said he was sorry.
Is this being a "homophobic douchebag", considering that all politicians from both sides of the aisle held the same views at some point not so distant in time from 2008?
Just to put things in context, in 2008 Joe Biden asserted he opposed “redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage.” Also a "homophobic douchebag"?
Also the guy is a genius, he invented Javascript, his technical prowess would probably have an effect on Brave, rather than his political views.
This intolerance of even the slightest political dissent is worrying.

> all politicians from both sides of the aisle held the same views at some point not so distant in time from 2008?To pick an obvious example, Sen. Sanders didn't hold this view and hasn't for his entire political career
> This intolerance of even the slightest political dissent is worrying.
I generally agree with you, but not in this case. There are some things we consider "politics" that just shouldn't be. Equal rights for people who hurt no one is one of those
Someone has to be pretty far down the rabbit hole before they start contributing money to a cause. This was a deeply held public view of his from what, only 12 years ago? It's relevant when we're talking about a search engine. I wouldn't trust a newspaper published by him either

Brave also has a sketchy past with regard to trust and privacy. Lying, misrepresentation, reading and modifying private data: I'd rather just not mess with it.

Not to mention, there is no evidence that his alleged homophobic douchebaggery has had any effect on any of his products.

That wasn't claimed.

> Here we go again... He donated a few thousands dollars in 2008 and 2010 to a referendum campaign against same-sex marriage. He then repeatedly said he was sorry.When did he say he was sorry? I don't think I've ever seen him apologize.

Yes, he did, on his personal blog.https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/new-m...
https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/

That doesn't seem like an apology for donating. It seems like a promise not to discriminate in the future.

I don't see anything there even close to him saying sorry. Did you post the wrong links?

No, it's the right link. "Express my sorrow at having caused pain" is a more formal way of saying "I am sorry I have caused pain".You are free to claim there are some subtle differences (pro tip: there are not), but further nitpicking will make you look a bit foolish, in my opinion. Your choice.

That isn't even a full sentence :DThis is hilarious.

It's a sad state when asking a question for follow up gets voted down. You asked a question, and stated a personal fact, that you don't think you've ever seen him apologize. And somehow, this is offensive or doesn't contribute.Let that sink in. That providing the information, the links, the reference to this somehow doesn't contribute.
Shame.

That's some weird reasoning you're trying to stack up here.He donated, he paid the price for that.
Now throwing the "both sides"-Trumpism into the room doesn't change anything here because it's not those politicians who run Brave and were CEOs of Mozilla.
Also how "slight" the dissent is, is not for you to judge. It hurt some people more than others. You are not to dictate them how much it's supposed to hurt them.
He REPEATEDLY said he was sorry? Where? The only one I could find was a subordinate clause drowned within a "we'll probably do many other things in the future" -post.

The worst part is, as you called out with Biden, the intolerance isn't even consistently applied. They'll forgive people when it's convenient for them, and everyone else is irredeemable.

Biden is bad too.

He donated money to try and prevent a group of people from having the same rights as the majority of people. That’s never ok and it shouldn’t take an awakening to figure out that it’s wrong.Not advocating he should be #cancelled or anything like that, but justifying his advocacy against civil rights as “political dissent” is disingenuous.
Edit: I find it pretty appalling that a comment calmly stating that advocating against civil rights is wrong is downvoted AND flagged.

So is donating money better or worse than an actual lawmaker saying they shouldn't have those rights? I'm confused.

What does that have to do with anything? They’re both wrong and it doesn’t matter which one is “worse” if in fact either one is. One bad thing does not negate a less bad thing if that’s the direction you were going.

I think that it's asinine to list a private citizen previously holding this view as a reason to not use a web browser but at the same time being OK with a lawmaker who also previously held the same view being POTUS.

All depends on the Letter after their name. Everyone knows this, but pretends it's not the case.

A while back, I noticed DuckDuckGo stopped working when I blocked network access to Microsoft ASNs on my router. It turns out - DDG is hosted directly on Microsoft servers!

You've heard of Azure, no?

Azure is owned by Microsoft.

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