That's why I'm asking about Startpage. Why do you think DuckDuckGo uniquely got put into a position of jeopardy - something more than scrutiny - when others did not?
More fundamentally though our web tracking protections are built upon a data set (we call Tracker Radar) that is frequently updated based on web crawling (we call our Tracker Radar Detector), which offers a much more comprehensive picture of third-party web tracking of which to base lists and evolving protections relative to solely community maintained lists. Both of these are open source on github. We also have an analogous data set for our HTTPS upgrade list (we call Smarter Encryption), updated daily based on continuous crawling, which is also open source.
C'mon, you're being intellectually dishonest here. uBlock Origin and AdGuard has all these things to check on. Even the obscure stuff, like FLEDGE ( https://adguard.com/en/blog/adguard-privacy-sandbox-topics-b...).
At the end of the day, at your company and at AdGuard's, it is only really one person's full time job to find this stuff. And your guy and AdGuard's guy are both reading the same garbage Twitter posts all day from the guy who's actually sourcing issues. Which he does for free because his particular malfunction is being really passionate about hating Google. And that's why we hear about FLEDGE.
This is tough. I think people want you to succeed. But I suspect the reason you didn't answer my question - why do you think you guys got raked over the coals for the Microsoft thing? - is, from your point of view, you probably think it's a smear campaign from Google, and your people have cautioned you that it sounds really conspiratorial and salty. Maybe it's true!
I can't imagine you're going to say "because Startpage is better" or "because the issues people complained about were substantive" (they weren't). And indeed, Google complains to the press about how you guys are like a mere fraction of their size, "down the street," and receiving so much intellectual attention and funding from the digerati despite having, essentially, a meaningless impact on anyone's use of the web. No offense. Like I said people want you to succeed.
But you have to do so without the sales pitch. Because it makes it sound like you'll do anything to survive, which may be good in the long term but is probably the real reason the Microsoft thing looks bad: It smelled desperate and unbecoming of someone entrusted to provide a privacy focused service.
And maybe you're going to do a full Justin Roiland and accuse everyone on the anonymous Internet forum of being totally lazy compared to you. You can be one of those "ra ra Elon Musk" people. Listen, you have no idea who writes these anonymous posts.
That said, I think the people who are talking about the censorship thing are morons and I wish you'd just focus on what I'm talking about here.
> More fundamentally though our web tracking protections are built upon a data set (we call Tracker Radar) that is frequently updated based on web crawling (we call our Tracker Radar Detector), which offers a much more comprehensive picture of third-party web tracking of which to base lists and evolving protections relative to solely community maintained lists.
It is certaintly feasible that a funded company has more time and resources to keep these lists up to date, as compared to community-maintained ones
I’m skeptical of using the service since it’s a US based service and the US doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to privacy.
For this reason I only ever use DDG combined with an anonymous mixer service like Tor. It would be trivial for bad actors to be placed in your data center and tie specific IPs to particular searches, no?
https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2022/07/25/my-website-disa...
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/bing.html
https://io.bikegremlin.com/28530/microsoft-bing-serp-gone-ov...
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-bing/help-w...
Where can cases like this be reported to DuckDuckGo?
One of those websites reported having problems for a month or so, then having it sorted out all by itself. The author's article on that:
https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2022/07/25/my-website-disa...
My sites are technically present, but shown only when I search for the exact domain (bikegremlin.com) or the site name (BikeGremlin).
But none of my articles are shown in SERP when I search queries that otherwise get my articles to top-3 on Google.
I've tried submitting URLs for indexing, to see if that will help, now that at least some problems seem to have been fixed. We'll know in a few days... weeks... months if that's helped. :)
So far, articles in my native are back, at least to a degree. But none of my articles in English, even those that used to rank highly (both on Google and Bing/DuckDuckGo etc).
I've used this situation to check which search engines rely on Bing for their results (primitive, unscientific method, but I think it's accurate): https://io.bikegremlin.com/28530/microsoft-bing-serp-gone-ov...
You're also in a unique position to compete with Google by offering advanced search tools. You have the data! Yet I can only search images by "past day", "past week", "past month". Off to Google I go again.
In the same vein, what are you doing to combat SEO spam? Again, you're in the unique position to do something for the public good and your profits here. Your search engine also suffers from the many low quality results of "buy buy buy" (the thing I want information on, not buy, god damn it) and github/SO rehashing sites, ad-laden blog spam and the like.
But imagine if it didn't! Imagine the web being searchable again!
Currently I somewhat follow projects like search.marginalia.nu and mwmbwl (or something), but those don't even have 0.1% of your funding.
I just want to be able to find content made by humans again ...
I feel quite strongly about this because I, like I suspect many who use DDG, swapped over largely because I didn't really like the games Google was playing with search. As DDG goes down the same path I've moved on once again, but have been left with quite a sour taste in my mouth. I evangelized for your site for years, including on this site/account. Changes like this are the antithesis of everything that drew many people to DDG to begin with.
Politically speaking, lots of people switched to DDG not for privacy, but because it never down ranked politically biased news like Google. I don't believe DDG's mission statement is to be the bastion of misinformation.
You don't index shit yourselves so when Bing censors something you do too.
I hear you when you say you don't remove content, but do you, or to what extent do you throttle/downrank websites?
Still not buying it.
Does your hiring process still discriminate illegally? https://www.publish0x.com/late-to-the-pol/duckduckgo-alleged...
You're a bad actor with a product that does nothing but scrape Bing and pretends to stand for privacy. Just give it up.