top | item 21651610

Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

535 points| stopads | 6 years ago |twitter.com

228 comments

order
[+] pkamb|6 years ago|reply
I switched my iPhone to Duck Duck Go over the last few days simply because I hate hate HATE getting linked to Reddit AMP pages from Google.

Reddit (and Stack Exchange) pages are what I use most to find honest discussions about some topic. Very convenient to use those results to filter through the blogspam.

Reddit's AMP pages are especially bad, with multiple annoying pop-ups that don't get cookied when you dismiss them on AMP. I don't understand what Reddit is getting out of the deal... their mobile site is equally as "mobile" as the AMP page. The AMP experience is so bad.

No preference to un-AMP yourself on Google. So, I switched my search engine. The DDG results seem significantly worse, or at least very different. But old.reddit.com pages load perfectly, and fast.

[+] __ka|6 years ago|reply
I have mixed feelings about this. If you recommend DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia you're essentially recommending Bing. Each of them have to show bing ads, forward the users' IPs as per Bing's terms of service (to fight ad fraud etc). Similarly, if you recommend StartPage, you're recommending Google. Same drill with ads.

I like DuckDuckGo. But unless they build their own search - I think the fundamental problem has not been tackled. There is no good, independent, private search alternative.

[Edit] I am not trying to single out DDG. There are a few replies that either demand for proof (rightfully) or suggest Bing is used only sometimes. I do not have conclusive proof, but have worked on search. Here's a couple of things for the curious:

1. Try to run this test: If you query "what is my ip" in duckduckgo (DDG), or any of the other ones I mentioned, you will notice in the description of one of the top results this IP: 207.46.13.147. It's a BingBot IP [0]. It's a good enough test to spot where results are coming from.

2. Open two browser windows side by side with DDG and Bing. Turn on results for the country you are in in DDG. Look attentively. Try image search.

It is clear that DDG does some re-ranking based on its own, but it's very often the same results.

[0] https://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/207.46.13.147

[+] jt2190|6 years ago|reply
You say:

> Each of [Bing’s search partners] have to show bing ads, forward the users' IPs as per Bing's terms of service (to fight ad fraud etc).

But DuckDuckGo says:

> [W]e never share any personal information with any of our partners. The way it works is when we call a partner for information, it is proxied through our servers so it stays completely anonymous. That is, any call to a partner looks to the partner as it is from us and not the user itself, and no user personal information is passed in that process (e.g. their IP address). That way we can build our search result pages using these 100s of partner sources, while still keeping them completely anonymous to you.

https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/

[+] AdamSC1|6 years ago|reply
>Each of them have to show bing ads, forward the users' IPs as per Bing's terms of service (to fight ad fraud etc)

The ToS you are referring to is for companies without custom deals in place.

You can read DuckDuckGo's privacy policy here: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy

[+] twblalock|6 years ago|reply
> I like DuckDuckGo. But unless they build their own search - I think the fundamental problem has not been tackled. There is no good, independent, private search alternative.

There isn't going to be, because it's really hard and expensive to do that. I don't see how any startup could even begin to compete with their own search engine.

The barrier to entry is extremely high: Bing probably would not have survived long enough to be profitable if it had been a startup. Microsoft put a lot of money into building it.

Subscriptions and micropayments would not be a solution for DDG because too few people would be willing to pay. Ad revenue is the only model that has sustained search engines in the long term.

[+] metastart|6 years ago|reply
Yes, you're basically right...but the problem isn't building your own search engine, it's in getting search ads privately as well as just being transparent and honest about how your service works -- none of which is true for DuckDuckGo sadly. Their business model is built on sending your personal data to bing when you click on ads on their search results page which link to Bing (moreover they say they never send your IP or personal information to a third-party, but presenting an ad on your search results without disclosing that the ad links to Bing may not "legally" violate that clause but it does in spirit). Ads are also localized so even if they aren't sending your IP address (which according to Bing they are supposed to be doing, but in their terms they claim not to), they're sending your location data. DuckDuckGo further refuses to clarify what data they do send (i.e. how accurate the location data is, what is it even) to retrieve search ads. They aren't transparent about how they work and their business model is fundamentally built on non-private search ads from Bing. It's not "true privacy" nor sincere to say you're not saving any user-related data when you're sending a lot of it to firms like Bing who do save it. The only search engines close to being truly private are epicsearch.in (part of the Epic Privacy Browser) and maybe some small, interesting efforts like private.sh, neither of which have search ads.
[+] zepearl|6 years ago|reply
Does anybody have any infos about Qwant?

It's the only EU-based search engine with its own indexing engine ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant )

I don't care if it's EU or not, but is the index real or kind of half-fake? (like "yes, we have an index, but it's 10MBs big...")

I started using Qwant ~2 months ago and it isn't bad: the snippets that are shown in the search results often don't contain the search terms that I used but the links were so far good - but I did mostly lookups for e.g. functions and other reference data - the few times that I challenged it with exact searches its results were similar to the ones of Google, meaning that it didn't return the websites that contained such exact sequences of characters.

[+] catalogia|6 years ago|reply
I'd rather 100 people know 1% about me than 1 person know 100% about me. Even if the only thing duckduckgo did was spread knowledge about me thinner, it would have value. Google already has most of my email (because most people I send emails to use gmail) and my youtube viewing history. Giving them my general search history as well isn't something I'm keen on.

Duckduckgo isn't perfect but they're better than google. If I knew of something better than duckduckgo, I'd use that instead. But I'm not going to let perfect be the enemy of good.

[+] liambates|6 years ago|reply
Aren't DuckDuckGo searches a mixture of Bing, Yahoo, Yandex and their own crawler?

I don't know a great deal about their infrastructure and would love to learn more about it.

[+] Yizahi|6 years ago|reply
There are basically 4 search engines left in the whole world - Baidu (China), Yandex (Russia, recently officially with KGB management), Google and Bing. That is all, full stop. Everyone else is a fancy GUI for on them. Google has more than 90% market share and each of the rest has like 1-3%. Building new engine is prohibitively costly and hard. So the lesser evil is Bing, by simple elimination.
[+] kitotik|6 years ago|reply
> But unless they build their > own search

IIUC, they have built their own search, but use Bing(among others) for paid ads.

If this is the case, it seems that it’s the business model that needs innovation and not the search engine itself.

[+] kelnos|6 years ago|reply
> Try to run this test: If you query "what is my ip" in duckduckgo (DDG)

I tried that, and did not see 207.* anywhere on the page. It displayed my IP address above the results list, and then a list of reasonable results for that query, without any IP addresses listed in any of the descriptions.

[+] apatters|6 years ago|reply
A duopoly will be marginally better at implementing user-friendly features like privacy than a monopoly, because there is at least nominal competition.

However I think we need to start asking deeper questions - why is it that concentration is so prevalent in the software industry?

Software is often said to have "natural" monopoly characteristics, but are those characteristics really a product of "nature" in the way that say the laws of physics are, or are they a product of IP laws and the regulatory choices made by the government?

[+] guelo|6 years ago|reply
> forward the users' IPs

Seems doubtful since that would be contrary to DDG's main marketing message and their reason for even existing.

[+] iagovar|6 years ago|reply
AFAIK qwant is using its own engine
[+] jlarocco|6 years ago|reply
Do you have a reference about DDG using Bing?

It's not mentioned on their site, or their wikipedia entry, or anywhere else I could find, and the results were different when I tried a few searches in them both just now.

Are they "Using Bing" in the same sense they "Use Wikipedia" to put info boxes on the results page sometimes?

[+] CriticalCathed|6 years ago|reply
This isn't true about DuckDuckGo. You've come to an erroneous conclusion based on bad interpretation of information.
[+] randomsearch|6 years ago|reply
Please edit your post as you’re spreading FUD and are clearly incorrect.
[+] Madmallard|6 years ago|reply
wtf is that true? ip logging literally defeats the purpose of "privacy"...
[+] unicornporn|6 years ago|reply
Honest question: how do you people even cope with the crap results?

I'm a StartPage user, but decided to try DDG for some time after the System1 debacle [1]. The Swedish localized search results are downright unusable compared to StartPage/Google. I'm really trying to give it a chance, but I keep reaching for SP in every other search.

[1] https://reclaimthenet.org/startpage-buyout-ad-tech-company/

[+] Semaphor|6 years ago|reply
Because they aren’t crap for me the vast majority of the time. I often hear about local results, but flipping the "Germany" switch gives me great German results.

There are 2 cases when I need to use !g, both of them are when there aren’t many results:

1. Rare error, simply not in their index

2. Ambiguous term and I need to force a part of the query to appear. Because DDG thinks it’s perfectly fine to ignore the user sometimes and show you completely unrelated things even if you tried your best to tell them what you are looking for and it’s in their index.

Sadly recently google started doing that as well. Not as bad as DDG, the first few results are still an answer to my query, but then they decide to spam the results with useless sites that don’t have the term.

edit: formatting

[+] danShumway|6 years ago|reply
Completely honest answer, not trying to be dismissive -- DuckDuckGo gives me fine results for most of my queries. I don't reach for Google that much unless I'm doing a deep dive into a problem that's hard to search in general, in which case I often find I'm aggregating results from multiple search engines.

I find Google better at some results -- occasionally Google "gets" what I'm trying to search for better than DuckDuckGo does and zeroes in more specifically on the topic. Sometimes I find that DuckDuckGo does the same. I particularly think that DuckDuckGo's smart cards are just (to me) obviously better than Google's. DuckDuckGo's news is really bad for me, I guess -- I pretty much always use Google News for current events.

This comes up pretty much every time that DuckDuckGo comes up, and I have seen it come up so often, that when I step back and try to come up with a semi-impartial reading of which engine is better, the only conclusion I can reach is that a lot of people have different opinions about how a search engine should react when they search. I think different search results are an acquired taste, and there just isn't an objective right or wrong answer to which engine is better.

So it's a little like if someone was recommending eating vegetables, and you asked, "but what do you do about the crap taste of spinach?" You have a real problem in that I want to help you find foods you like, but at the same time, I'm not trying to "solve" the way spinach tastes. I don't agree that spinach is "wrong", it's just not what you want.

From that point of view, having multiple, diverse search engines is good, and we'd all be served better by using multiple search engines. I don't want DuckDuckGo to just be a Google clone; part of the reason I use it is because of their different results. I do want it to improve and get better, but I disagree that morphing into Google 2.0 will accomplish that for me.

If you like Google's style of search results, then what you really need is a trustworthy replacement for Startpage. You need Google but without the tracking -- and DuckDuckGo isn't just Google without the tracking. I think you're justified in telling anyone who says, "just use DuckDuckGo" to shove off, since DuckDuckGo isn't solving your problem. But I don't agree that DuckDuckGo has bad results, it has a different flavor than you're used to.

[+] joe_the_user|6 years ago|reply
I too use DDG first and I'm just willing to suffer a bit 'till I use Google. Using DDG first at least keeps Google honest and they are only a click away on Firefox.

The thing that's saddest is not only are DDG results not as smart but they also seem dumbed-down in the fashion of Google - ie, too much "your search" --> "what we imagine you really want" --> "here's our curated list of things like this (and screw your actual keywords)"

[+] phowat|6 years ago|reply
I use DDG as my main search engine and I agree localised results are subpar ( I'm Brazilian ). I end up resorting to the !g bang most of the time but since these kinds of searches are a just small subset of my queries, it doesn't bother me that much.
[+] lettergram|6 years ago|reply
I honestly can always find what I want with DDG or I can’t find it in DDG or Google. If I end up searching Google it’s essentially the same results, but it also depends how you search.

I’m either searching for something straight forward and Wikipedia (or some other obvious site) suffices or its so niche that neither Google or DDG work.

I also wrote my own search engine that works well for my niche topics (better than either IMO). Mostly for discovering interesting aspect though.

[+] SquishyPanda23|6 years ago|reply
Some searches work well on DDG and some don't, which is why nearly everyone falls back on !g for some types of searches.

My guess is that you more frequently search for things in the fallback category compared to users that find DDG's results to be non-crap.

Swedish non-localizes search almost certainly falls in that category.

The bang operator is pretty amazing once you get used to it. It gives you control over what you're searching for again.

I use !w (Wikipedia) !yt (YouTube) !d (dictionary) !rhyme (rhyming dictionary) and !gsc (Google scholar) regularly.

[+] dwighttk|6 years ago|reply
Honest answer: I don't really search that much but my ddg results aren't crap
[+] wiggler00m|6 years ago|reply
I love DuckDuckGo and use it by default but the results do suck. They are improving, however.
[+] lemming|6 years ago|reply
It's not just you. I sincerely believe in DDG's mission, but the sad truth is I just can't find what I want with it. Unfortunately there seems to be no good way to use Startpage with Safari either.
[+] darzu|6 years ago|reply
DuckDuckGo is still not ready to be my daily driver.

Here's my last significant Google search: "monaco IndentAction.Indent"

The documentation I was looking for[0] was the:

- 1st hit on Google[1]

- 17th hit on DDG[2]

but to be fair I didn't find it within the first 10 (!) pages of Bing[3], so at least it's better than Bing. And I work for MSFT. I submitted feedback to DDG & Bing, hopefully it helps.

[0] https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/api/enums/monaco.l...

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=monaco+IndentAction.Indent&o...

[2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=monaco+IndentAction.Indent&t=h_&ia...

[3] https://www.bing.com/search?q=%2bmonaco+IndentAction.Indent&...

[+] gundmc|6 years ago|reply
Digital ad company CEO endorses competitor of rival digital ad company.
[+] throwgoo52441|6 years ago|reply
Google appears to be doing increasingly creepy stuff in pursuit of higher revenues.

For instance, I've recently noticed videos being recommended on my Android TV which are particularly related to, or the exactly the same as, those I watched recently on my computer (all done in private mode, no Google login anywhere). This has happened twice after resetting everything. It therefore appears that, contrary to their statements on tracking IP addresses, they're infact using them for recommendations and tracking. We can only imagine what else they are collecting behind the facade of SVs slef-conceited "liberalism".

[+] skuthus|6 years ago|reply
This is awesome - happy to see privacy oriented search become more popular. I think DuckDuckGo needs a better name though - Something more ubiquitous. Duck, maybe? Quack?
[+] Waterluvian|6 years ago|reply
I've heard about Duck Duck Go for a while and just never bothered. But I finally decided to try it. It was easy. Settings -> Search Engines -> DuckDuckGo.

And so far it's just fine. Gives me great results when searching for coding stuff.

[+] flurdy|6 years ago|reply
Duckduckgo is great. But also because the easy !g !gi !tw shortcuts to search in google or twitter as well.

Surprised to find lately that a lot of my searches only return relevant results in a twitter search.

[+] Seb-C|6 years ago|reply
I did try DDG and Startpage a few years ago but ultimately gave up because the results were not good.

I gave another try to DDG since about 3 weeks and so far the results are pretty good. Not only they got better on the last few years, but for me Google got worse at the same time.

Almost everytime I search in Google nowadays, I have to reformulate my search 2~3 times to get decent results. I often need to add double quotes, ask for reddit or specify the language. Google today just tries too much to read my mind, guess what I want and make interpretations instead of just doing what I asked. Because of this huge waste of time, I became frustrated over time.

Also, I am French, use English very often (including at work) and live in Japan, so the explicit region filter of DDG is really a bless compared to the obscure and almost always wrong way Google handles this.

[+] madiathomas|6 years ago|reply
I tried DDG a while ago and it didn't feel natural to me. It will be so hard for me to change a search engine after using Google for 20 years. I am too attached to this search engine and it is good enough for my needs. I rarely change things that are working for me. It feels strange for me when I am using other search engines. I feel like I am cheating on my spouse. The first thing I do when I buy an iPhone is to hide Safari and download Google Chrome. Same thing when I buy a new Windows laptop, or reinstall Windows, I use IE/Edge to download Chrome and never use IE/Edge again. Chrome is the main reason I haven't switched to another search engine. It works better with Google apps and I rely on Google apps a lot.
[+] tomcooks|6 years ago|reply
> rarely change things that are working for me.

But what if said things change to the point that they're unrecognisable? What if said spouse cheats you? Because that's what's happening.

[+] vfc1|6 years ago|reply
I've tried it and the results just aren't as good as Google. For example, it does not index Javascript-heavy pages, which means a lot of documentation websites for popular open source projects are seen as blank pages by their indexer and simply won't be ranked.

Also, the ability to identity a given user allows Google to serve personalized and therefore more relevant search results (which of course means you also get personalized ads).

[+] on_and_off|6 years ago|reply
I felt that it was time to try to switch to DDG, so I just went to the duckduckgo website, and it proposes to "add it to chrome".

It leads to a chrome extension page asking me to give complete read access to what pages I visit to the DDG extension.

Naive question : how can I know what DDG will do with that data ? (And yes I realize that this question applies to any search engine or extension)

[+] throwaway122378|6 years ago|reply
I call publicity stunt. Jack is doing just as much to censor free thought as is Google.
[+] lifeisstillgood|6 years ago|reply
I was very impressed listening to Weinberg on The Angel Philospher podcast recently, and have been very happy with DDG as my default engine for about a year. And yet it was only yesterday that I realised that (for a certain section of the web) adverts on DDG are playing to a self selected audience - basically it's like running banner ads on HN.

Weirdly you seem to have to go through BingYahoo - https://www.shivarweb.com/9242/how-to-advertise-on-duckduckg...

[+] partingshots|6 years ago|reply
This is basically just endorsing Bing though. There’s nothing wrong with that mind you, but I think it’s important to realize that DuckDuckGo is effectively just a wrapper around Bing.
[+] ydb|6 years ago|reply
Yes @jack yes! Hopefully more high-profile thought leaders will enter the public discourse to advise on more sane, privacy-respecting alternatives.

I'm glad I was relieved of hating @jack at least momentarily. :')

[+] buboard|6 years ago|reply
Searching google nowadays feels like searching an ad database. For me it isn't even a matter of privacy but about exclusion of 90% of the web out there. Bing is not bad either, nor is yandex. What else is there? Remember when google was like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8JT9QWA-eY
[+] tuldia|6 years ago|reply
Given the amount of M$ ads DDG has showing latelly does not surprises me they might be partnering with bing.
[+] mlinksva|6 years ago|reply
> The app is even better!

What does that mean? I guess https://duckduckgo.com/app is a browser, and a browser extension? The app is a relatively better browser than DDG search is a search engine?

[+] sprite-1|6 years ago|reply
The DDG app is honestly pretty bad... the last time I tried it, there wasn't even support for tabs so you're stuck with one page view at a time.

Honestly, IDK why anyone would not just use Firefox Mobile. It's got addons support too