DuckDuckGo faces widespread backlash over tracking deal with Microsoft | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo faces widespread backlash over tracking deal with Microsoft

thenextweb.com

46 pointsultramanni18 comments

While Microsoft may require this, I put the blame here entirely on DuckDuckGo. They should be spending a not-insignificant amount of money on replacing Bing, either with an in-house solution or a reasonable 3rd party. This isn’t about actually replacing Bing, it’s about having leverage on Microsoft so they can’t make these kinds of asks of a company who claims to be “privacy focused”.

DuckDuckGo CEO put a response on r/technology: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/uxiah9/duckduck.... In it he claims there aren't viable alternatives.

Here's a quote from the relevant part: "While a lot of what you see on our results page privately incorporates content from other sources, including our own indexes (e.g., Wikipedia, Local listings, Sports, etc.), we source most of our traditional links and images privately from Bing (though because of other search technology our link and image results still may look different). Really only two companies (Google and Microsoft) have a high-quality global web link index (because I believe it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to do), and so literally every other global search engine needs to bootstrap with one or both of them to provide a mainstream search product. The same is true for maps btw -- only the biggest companies can similarly afford to put satellites up and send ground cars to take streetview pictures of every neighborhood."

While I appreciate this response from the CEO, I still think that he and DDG lack creativity. Again it is not about actually replacing Bing but having leverage on Microsoft. DDG pays Microsoft a whole lot of money I imagine for that search, so it shouldn’t take much for them keep their promises on privacy.

In fact the way I read this, I just see someone who is essentially saying they’d rather have good search results if it means sacrificing privacy.

> In fact the way I read this, I just see someone who is essentially saying they’d rather have good search results if it means sacrificing privacy.

Which would be ok for most CEOs but not for the one from DDG where the only raison d'etre is privacy :)

What makes you think they can get significant leverage on MS, a company that is literally on the order of 1,000 times bigger (Wikipedia says DDG has about 150 employees, to MS's 182,000 and market cap of 2 trillion!).

> because I believe it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to do

We have a 5+ billion webpage search index and API. $billions? We don't think so.

> literally every other global search engine needs to bootstrap with one or both of them

I guess we are the exception; we provide no-tracking search to users globally. We have an API with less constraints than Google or Bing.

The main villain is Microsoft, the spyware company that makes windows, that forces its contractual partners to disable surveillance blocking

Aaannd for a company that is marketed to be a privacy focused alternative to Google, DDG is doing virtually nothing to engineer their own search engine, instead choosing to rely on a corporation that's not exactly known for their privacy efforts.

Exactly. It's been such a long time since they've launched. You can't just say M$ and Goog are the only players with a large index so our hands are tied up.

Have to start working towards a long time solution or you'll be at their mercy.

Assuming the quote here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31550090) is correct, where do you expect them to get $1 billion+/year to do this?

Assuming the quote is correct seems questionable. How much was Google pulling in when they started again? The internet has gotten bigger, but most of the increase is it media (video, audio, and images) that you can skip indexing anyway as a first pass.

Doesn't suprize me as DuckDuckGo has been moving in some strange directions for a while now. I could be wrong, but it doesn't seem like their product has seen much innovation ether. I'm all in on Brave Search.

Yeah people believe all kinds of things. Look how bad Google is, and how good is DDG compared to the big evil. A few years later: well, DDG also has evil traits. Now go, abandon ship and use Brave search. People still don't know jacksh*t at all about Brave, who they are, who they work for, what are their intentions. And this continues ad infinitum. Just follow some authetic looking figure's recommendations like a monkey.

This appears to be mainly about the DDG browser. Firefox without UBO seems is unaffected.

Actually Firefox doesn't do any content blocking by default on their equivalent iOS/Android apps, i.e., see bottom 'tracker content blocking' section of https://privacytests.org/ios.html & https://privacytests.org/android.html (which is a third-party audit site).

This site also indicates Firefox Focus has content blocking holes for Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yandex.

And on desktop Firefox doesn't do any content protection by default, but even their cookie protection has these same holes (see 'tracking cookie protection' section of https://privacytests.org/).

Similarly, Safari blocks cookies but doesn't do any content blocking, even in private mode.

I think they put these holes in because otherwise they end up having to deal with tons of users complaining they can't sign into outlook/Hotmail etc anymore.

I use O365 for work and I've had to unblock a ton of MS crap in my pihole for stuff to work without VPN (we had serious VPN issues for a while). Microsoft apps are extremely chatty. Tons of requests going to azure, pipe.aria.microsoft.com. Etc. Tens per minute, no kidding.

Nope, none of these have anything to do with logins, i.e., Google ad pixel, Google tag manager, Bing ads, or Yandex ads. We're not talking about the entire domain here, but particular ad scripts -- if you click the name on the page they tell you exactly what path they are referring to.

Thank for clarifying!

I actually, I wanted to write"with UBO", probably a brain fog...

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