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Comment by pete_nic | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine building an entire business that ceases to be profitable as soon as you can't spy on users.

>I wish we could do the same thing to Google.

You’re assuming Google’s core business would not exist without spying on users and I disagree. You can run a search business and still protect privacy, this is DuckDuckGo’s whole model. This is a fundamental difference between a search product and a social product.

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As a long time DDG user, Google Search is better. I end up searching again on Google about half of the time I search for technical stuff (software) or for non English sites. I just feel DDG didn't understand what I want and Google usually does. I don't login on Google and use a Firefox extension to clear the cookies so Google might only rely on the search term, not my history, but who knows.

Google is not a search product. Their revenue come from Adwords, which is only effective with good targeting to the fitting users.

Of course we'll never know how much of a difference targeting makes to the bottom line, but I doubt that it's huge.

Google's revenue comes from people searching for queries like "good traffic ticket lawyer", and from competitors bidding up each others' brand names. It would probably work just fine without targeting.

Google's ads do not seem particularly well targeted, even with the 20+ years of information they have collected on me. I feel like I've given up way, way too much of my privacy for what I've been given in return.

By far, the best targeting is to show an ad as I explicitly search for something and that's not going to go away for them anytime soon.

> which is only effective with good targeting to the fitting users

You talk like that’s the only way. Instead of fitting the ad to users, we could fit the ad to the content, like we’ve always done. Tracking users isn’t necessary.

> is only effective with good targeting to the fitting users

This isn't true in my experience. When I was an affiliate marketer in a past life, it was extremely profitable to promote health and fitness products on generic search terms such as "basketball" and "football scores". User demographic data wasn't required.

Unfortunately, Google decided that they don't like affiliate marketers.

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