[HN Gopher] DuckDuckGo's quest to prove online privacy is possible
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DuckDuckGo's quest to prove online privacy is possible
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 168 points
Date : 2021-06-16 11:44 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| mywacaday wrote:
| The best use I have found for DDG is when on mobile I use chrome
| and when a website says you have reached your max articles per
| month just share to DDG and and read away
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| Anecdata, I've switched to DDG as my default search engine on
| both desktop and mobile.
|
| At the beginnning I would still go back to google for technical
| queries, but by now I have accepted that DDG is actually better
| at excluding spam/SEO stuff than google. Also the fact that it
| actually honours keywords like 'site:' 'domain:' is a huge time
| saver.
|
| The difference may be regional or specific to my areas of
| interest so perhaps your mileage may vary but to me DDG has
| improved substantially in the past 2 years whereas google just
| seems to increasingly just push for this natural language
| paradigm and discard my specific query, showing instead
| whatever popular approximation it chooses (I can only assume
| this probably saves them a tonne of resources and caters to
| >90% of users).
|
| The only feature I still feel google is unmatched is 'regional'
| online shopping discoverability. The 'Google Shopping' service
| is still the go to place for me to find specialist physical
| stores near me that also have an online retail front.
| dont__panic wrote:
| On mobile, I find DDG incredibly useful because it doesn't send
| me to AMP pages (which are inevitably broken), and on iOS I
| can't install any browser extensions to redirect me away from
| that mess.
| Tomte wrote:
| I've just repeated my experiment from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19043565
|
| DDG's results haven't gotten any better for that specific search.
| AdamN wrote:
| I wish DDG would have a toggle for the privacy/speed/other
| attributes of the destination site. I'd like to set minimums and
| simply never see those sites in my results.
|
| This would require allowlists and easy disabling for targeted
| searches but would generally stay enabled.
| thera2 wrote:
| Unlike most people here it seems, I started using DuckGo few
| years ago and have no issues at all. Everything works well or
| well enough, and although you cant verify their privacy claim, I
| certainly know it's as private if not more than Google at the
| very least.
| freediver wrote:
| DuckDuckGo has shown the world that building a privacy respecting
| search engine is possible. It brought an alternative to
| mainstream tracking based search.
|
| I'd like to see DDG innovate more as the product seems stale at
| this point. 10 years have gone by and the product hasn't evolved
| much, feels pretty much the same. It seems they are in some kind
| of contractual Bing Search/Ads dependency lockdown preventing
| them from innovation in search. Also, are ad-based business
| models really what we want from the web?
|
| On the other hand I can see them saying 'what we are doing has
| worked pretty well in the past, lets continue doing that".
| losvedir wrote:
| I haven't used DDG much but I tried for a while to use Bing
| (which, I believe serves most of its organic search results in
| the US?), since Microsoft had a thing for a while where they'd
| basically pay you to use their search engine. But even with that,
| I eventually found myself back on Google. So I'm not inclined to
| try DDG for a while anyway.
|
| Whatever happened to Brave? Aren't they working on a search
| engine, too. Anyone know if that similarly uses Bing, Yandex,
| etc, for the search results or if they have their own crawler?
| It's been a while since I've looked in depth at user agent logs
| to see if Brave is making an appearance.
| iusethemouse wrote:
| Brave are working on their search engine, they have been slowly
| inviting people to start using it (I got my invite a couple of
| weeks ago). As far as I know, it doesn't rely on other search
| engines for its results, although they do provide an optional
| setting to enable Google fallback in case a query doesn't
| return enough results, which mixes in Google results together
| with Brave's own.
|
| Overall, I've been finding it pretty good. It has information
| cards for various entities on the right-hand side, similar to
| all other search engines. You can additionally search for
| images, news, and videos.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I use it as my main search engine because google puts up a super
| annoying cookie banner if you are not logged in or have approved
| them before and that doesn't work with temporary containers (a
| genius extension for firefox that presents each new tab with its
| own cookie jar, making sites isolated not just from each other
| but even from other tabs that access the site).
| gbmatt wrote:
| A project I'm involved with https://private.sh/ has search
| privacy that is more verifiable than ddg. It uses client-side
| cryptography in the javascript, and routes your request through
| an anonymizing proxy, similar to how TOR works. The encrypted
| query is only readable by the search engine, in this case,
| gigablast, whereas the independent proxy scrubs your IP address.
| svat wrote:
| It would be nice if there were a tool of some sort where I could
| type a search term and on two halves of my screen the results
| from Google Search and from DuckDuckGo would appear... after
| trying that for a month or two, one would be better informed how
| the results differ, and be more confident about switching (one
| way or the other).
|
| I've had the idea for a while of writing for myself such a tool
| (probably can't be a browser extension?), but I haven't gotten
| around to it yet. Does one already exist, or is trivial to write?
|
| As I type this comment, I found that at the commandline on macOS
| one can do, say: open -a "Google Chrome"
| "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=umbrella" open -a "Google
| Chrome" "https://www.google.com/search?q=umbrella"
|
| (or whatever your usual browser is) and it's easy to wrap that in
| a script: function search() { open
| -a "Google Chrome" "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=$*"
| open -a "Google Chrome" "https://www.google.com/search?q=$*"
| }
|
| This (invoke like say `search freddie mercury`) opens two tabs
| and I haven't yet figured out how to open them in side-by-side
| windows, but maybe I'll try for a few weeks to be disciplined
| about doing all searches this way, and see how it goes. Seems
| worth finding out!
| Zhyl wrote:
| > I haven't yet figured out how to open them in side-by-side
| windows
|
| Two iframes side by side?
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23737427/how-to-put-two-...
| asdf54231 wrote:
| There have been programs which did this before google became so
| popular. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the
| software, but it would query several search engines and show
| the results below each other. I remember it had some colors
| indicating the progress next to it - like green, when it found
| something on that engine. That was the time when there was also
| Software to find the cheapest provider for dialing in over
| modem line at a particular time of the day - because it was
| expensive and each minute counted.
| asdf54231 wrote:
| Ah, found it (I used a much earlier version of it):
|
| https://copernic-2001-basic.informer.com/5.0/
| latexr wrote:
| This works as is but you'll want to edit the window position
| numbers (at the bottom). function search {
| local query="${@}" osascript -l JavaScript -e "
| browser = Application('Google Chrome')
| google_window = browser.Window().make() ddg_window =
| browser.Window().make()
| google_window.activeTab.url =
| 'https://duckduckgo.com/?q=${query}'
| ddg_window.activeTab.url =
| 'https://www.google.com/search?q=${query}'
| google_window.bounds = { 'x': 0, 'y': 0, 'width': 600,
| 'height': 600 } ddg_window.bounds = { 'x': 600, 'y':
| 0, 'width': 600, 'height': 600 } " }
|
| It could be improved in a few ways, like:
|
| * Not opening the extra window if Chrome isn't already running.
|
| * URL-encoding your query.
|
| * Auto-detecting the screen bounds (and Dock).
|
| * Auto-detecting the active browser.
|
| But I didn't want to turn this comment into a full-fledged
| gist. As is, this works in Chromium-based browsers (replace the
| name in the `browser = Application('Google Chrome')` line).
| Adding support for all of them and Safari is simple:
| https://gist.github.com/vitorgalvao/5392178
| ricardo81 wrote:
| >macOS
|
| At least on Linux it's likely doable with xdotool, it should
| let you identify the windows and put them where you want them.
| latexr wrote:
| On macOS it's doable[1] with AppleScript[2].
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27534252
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript
| holstvoogd wrote:
| Always ironic how many trackers are blocked when reading such
| articles
| swiley wrote:
| Does anyone have an explanation for DuckDuckGo censoring the
| "tank man" image during the recent anniversary of Tiananmen
| square?
| Daedren wrote:
| DDG uses Bing's API for search.
| yegg wrote:
| https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1401216879293874185
|
| "China banned DuckDuckGo in 2014 and we have no plans to change
| that. This image belongs in search results and never
| disappeared from our main page. For the image tab we mainly use
| Bing and they fixed the error. We're looking to supplement w/
| more sources."
| mda wrote:
| They also mainly use bing for everything else.
| yegg wrote:
| That's not really true -- I put more on that here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27528625
| sct202 wrote:
| I just went and repeated all my google searches from this
| morning, and the only knowledge cards that I got were
| from Wikipedia and the rest of the results were ads or
| the "blue links." I'm a little confused if the instant
| answers/knowledge cards refers to a larger piece of the
| results that blends in?
| mda wrote:
| So, what percentage of ddg's results for queries come
| from bing? like a ballpark estimate. Is it like 10%? 50%?
| 80%? Because in your answer you still carefully avoid
| giving any actual numbers.
|
| I still say (by looking at the results for random
| queries) that ddg is is mostly bing, do you have any
| actual data to refute this?
| corobo wrote:
| Yeah I just did a side by side for a few of my most
| recent queries and as far as I could tell it was all
| Bing. Same results, same order.
|
| Not opposed to it, just doesn't add up to the claim
| pb7 wrote:
| No data to refute it because the 10 links are still from
| Bing. Their crawlers and indexes are only for the instant
| answers for very specific queries. For the other 99.99%
| of queries, it's just Bing.
|
| Happy it bit them in the ass for the tank man image
| because they're constantly lying without lying about
| their complete reliance on Bing. Put differently, if Bing
| shuts down tomorrow, so does DDG.
| shantnutiwari wrote:
| I have been using DDG for a few years, and find a few problems
| with their results:
|
| * Some spammy links slip thru-- these are dumb sites with lot of
| stuffed keywords and zero actual content. I dont get these with
| Google. I've usually seen these when searching for questions
| related to email list providers, like Aweber or Activecampaign
|
| * Last year, I started getting random porn results for harmless
| queries, like "Monster videogame 2010". Again, didnt get these on
| Google.
|
| For these reasons, Im hesitant to recommend DDG to non-technical
| users.
|
| Why I stick with DDG-- I like to search in private windows, and
| Google harasses you everytime to accept their terms and
| conditions. On my iPhone, if I have 10 tabs open, I'll have to do
| this 10 times. DDG saves me a lot of this hassle.
|
| For me, the privacy is a bonus, but like other commenters have
| said, there is no way to verify these claims.
| chevill wrote:
| >I have been using DDG for a few years, and find a few problems
| with their results:
|
| I've tried it a few times, this latest time I've been using it
| exclusively for a month or two and the results are almost
| completely worthless 95% of the time and I end up using the !g
| operator. In many cases the results have nothing to do with
| that I typed at all.
|
| I've de-googled in every other way possible but Google's search
| engine is so much better than everything else I've tried that
| the rest are unusable.
|
| I've heard it said before that Google's effectiveness is mostly
| due to the vast amount of information they have about me but
| that's not it. I've used lots of computers all over the East
| coast that I had never used before without logging into an
| account and Google gives good results every time.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Good point about search in private windows, without nagging.
|
| I do much of my web browsing in private browser tabs. Why not?
| Even for things like HN, auto fill for login makes it easy and
| then when I follow links I don't worry so much about tracking
| cookies.
| Lunrtick wrote:
| My occasional accidental Google search for programming related
| things has been filled with spammy sites - I wouldn't quite
| describe them as "no content", but there really wasn't much of
| it. DDG isn't really better, but I definitely wouldn't say it's
| worse, at least for my searches.
| kergonath wrote:
| I'm often amazed how many Wikipedia ripoffs can get such high
| rankings on Google.
| shantnutiwari wrote:
| To clarify-- I didnt mean low quality, just zero quality.
|
| so if I searched for "How to move my email list to Aweber" I
| would get a page that was a copy paste of the Aweber home
| page, with my search term randomly sprinkled in.
|
| And it wasnt just 1-2 sites. Sometimes, the top 3-4 would be
| spam, and even Aweber's own help page would be pushed down.
|
| Seemed to me someone was doing some sort of dynamic search
| stuffing which was fooling DDG, but not Google. But the dark
| SEO was so obvious, I'm surprised DDG (or Bing or whoever
| they get their results from) fell for it.
| kfajdsl wrote:
| I've gotten that exact thing on Google but for some stack
| overflow questions or articles. However, they were usually
| pretty far down the list, though still on the first page.
| ajdoingnothing wrote:
| _I like to search in private windows, and Google harasses you
| everytime to accept their terms and conditions._
|
| I use incognito too for almost everything. However, I thought
| that the terms & conditions popup was only a Youtube thing (it
| drives me insane too)... I guess they haven't rolled it out to
| everyone yet.
| shantnutiwari wrote:
| Yeah, I get them for both Youtube and google
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| For 2, what are you leaving safe search at? When off, that
| seems like it's probably correct behavior for a search engine,
| and google removes it as people find it undesirable.
| shantnutiwari wrote:
| Whatever the default is-- I guess safesearch on?
|
| It only happened for a brief time, so I guess it was a bug in
| DDG. But when it did happen, it was serious enough I stopped
| using DDG at work completely.
| Santosh83 wrote:
| How about distributed crawlers coupled with a distributed
| datastore similar to Freenet?
|
| Your browser automatically crawls the pages you visit and adds
| the info to the distributed index that is also stored on all
| participating machines (perhaps with a copy on the cloud for
| query performance). Though a single browser may visit only a few
| pages, we ought to get a pretty good WWW index from the combined
| crawling of millions of browsers.
|
| Main advantage would be resistance to censorship.
| gostsamo wrote:
| Some indexes are really big. Plus, when you index a page, you
| must be sure that you are not indexing your email inbox. It
| would be better if the index is on the cloud, while the
| crawlers are distributed, but are not part of your browser.
| codyb wrote:
| I'll just chime in with my experience as well.
|
| Long time DDG user. Barely use bangs at this point. Haven't
| switched back to Google in ages.
|
| I don't really do much local searching, but it seems like that's
| an issue. When I do local searches I just quantify things "Best
| Thai food in <My Neighborhood>", but I live in area heavily
| traversed by food critics (I tend to avoid group reviews like
| Yelp, and Amazon which I tend to think of as easily gamed in
| favor of newspaper critics and Consumer Reports or America's Test
| Kitchen, an approach with its own pros and cons).
|
| Most things seem fine although the other day I got a ton of porn
| when I did an image search for an artist I was discovering "Rico
| Nasty". Thank god for work from home!
|
| As an aside, I find Google's search result interface extremely
| off putting at this point. I'm not exactly sure what it is? It
| seems like there's barely any results above the fold, it's much
| noisier with widgets everywhere, and why are the description
| strings only a sentence long at max?
|
| I downloaded a new copy of Chrome (or maybe it was the one that
| popped up from Cypress tests or something and I errantly used it
| as main browser window), and yeagh.
| butz wrote:
| It's annoying when search results throws everything at you:
| youtube videos, images, product carousels, etc. Probably they
| should add new section to search "text only" and ignore "rich"
| media results. Also related suggestions boxes after returning
| to search results gets old fast and are not useful at all. I
| need to get to next result in list, not start a new search.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I use DDG on my computer and phone. I like it a lot. Took me
| about 6 months to get used to how it searched and once in a while
| I still need to use !g to get google results.
|
| That is a very easy trade off for more privacy.
| fartcannon wrote:
| I don't know if I can use DuckduckGo after finding out they so
| strongly rely on Microsoft that their search results end up
| censored like Microsofts.
|
| I try to use these alternatives to lessen the absolute power of
| google and Microsoft, not quietly boost them.
|
| My fault, really.
| Karsteski wrote:
| You know what they say, just make your own search engine.
|
| I'm glad people are coming around to the fact that information
| is now controlled by a few giant tech companies.
| decasteve wrote:
| DDG relies on Microsoft for both search results and hosting as
| far as I can tell. The site itself is served from Azure
| endpoints.
| godshatter wrote:
| I have been using DDG as my main search engine for a few years
| now. I occasionally try out other search engines, but I haven't
| been to Bing (directly) or Google for many months at least. DDG
| is "good enough" for me. If I can't find a reasonable result to
| my query, I work on modifying my search terms or just give up.
|
| Having said that, my main concern is that someday in the future
| DDG will be sold to some less ethical company and I'll have to
| abandon it (having to start the search for a new search engine of
| choice all over again).
| mwint wrote:
| I've switched over to DDG as my default search engine across all
| devices/browsers. It's not as good as Google - but it's perfectly
| good enough for 95% of searches.
|
| For that other 5%, it's usually programming-related queries where
| everyday words take on new meanings. Since DDG doesn't tailor
| search results, it has a harder time with some of my uncommon
| word usage.
|
| For those, it takes two seconds to append "!g" at the end of the
| query to go to Google; it's barely disruptive to my workflow.
| I've noticed myself doing that less and less since I switched in
| January. Perhaps a combination of DDG getting better, and me
| getting better at tailoring my queries for it.
| marvinblum wrote:
| I've started using DDG last month and fallen back to Google for a
| few searches as the results are just better. DDGs results are
| often "good enough", but not quite on point as Google is. You can
| literally type in a question on Google and get an answer. DDG
| requires more thought of what you type in and you have to scan
| more results. First page is usually good enough, but I find
| myself changing the keywords more often than I did on Google.
| Overall I'm quite happy with it and use it on a daily basis.
| golfer wrote:
| Can anyone comment on the claims about DDG in this article? I see
| this pop up from time to time:
|
| http://techrights.org/2020/07/02/ddg-privacy-abuser-in-disgu...
| nescioquid wrote:
| The histrionic name-calling makes it difficult to take
| seriously. The standard criticisms of DDG are nestled in a
| sticky ooze of weird accusations like "Tor Project accepted a
| $25k "contribution" (read: bribe) from DDG", or "DDG consumed a
| room at FOSDEM 2018 to deliver a sales pitch".
| Semaphor wrote:
| My only issue with DDG (which is my main searchengine), is that
| they often ignore keywords (google is catching up to them
| though... do people really enter random terms that they don't
| want to search for?), annoyingly without telling you that they
| ignored the term (google does), and even worse, sometimes this
| happens when you force a search term with "'s. That's almost
| exclusively the reason I need to do !g. And as bing doesn't have
| the same issue, it has to somehow be them actively sabotaging my
| search.
| kemonocode wrote:
| I have some skepticism in those regards, at least unless they
| make use of their own crawlers.
|
| Bootstrapping themselves with different information sources as
| they've been doing is good for the very beginning as then they
| serve as a privacy-respecting aggregator to those sources, but as
| the tank man incident proved, you run the risk you'll be made
| complicit to censorship, whether intentionally or not.
| yegg wrote:
| Search has changed a lot in the past decade or so. Now most
| results pages are full of instant answers, e.g., knowledge
| graph responses (which we do completely ourselves) and local
| results (for which we have our own index + Apple Maps and local
| providers like TripAdvisor). In other words, it isn't just one
| index, but about 20 that really matter in terms of adoption.
|
| Additionally, people engage with the first thing on the page
| about twice as much as the second thing, and that second thing
| about twice as much as third thing, and so on. That means if
| instant answers are near the top (increasingly the case) it
| means that those sub-indexes are increasingly more important as
| they are engaged with relatively more than the traditional "10
| blue links."
|
| A lot of that traditional web index is also used for just
| navigational purposes, which we can easily do ourselves. We are
| already crawling for our tracker blocking data set, encryption
| data set, and several other things.
|
| In other words, we do make use of our own crawlers, and also
| have the ability to change some things around for indexes we
| use, which we do routinely. However, you need all of these
| indexes to make search work well, and have them all come up at
| the right times (a lot of what we do in search ourselves).
|
| In this context, I think people elevate the long-tail "web
| index" too much. Should we have satellites in space to make
| good maps? It is also necessary for search. Should we be
| collecting sports and stocks data ourselves? Also necessary for
| search, but no one really calls on us to do that.
|
| Our approach has been to partner with the best data providers
| in each vertical so we can provide the best alternative to
| Google search. And when nothing exists or it isn't good enough,
| we do it ourselves or add layers on top. To that end, it isn't
| binary -- there is a lot in between and in fact that's the way
| it works today.
| freediver wrote:
| Respectfully, vast majority of searches in DDG will still end
| up with no instant answer and ten (Bing) blue links. Stocks,
| weather and calculator.. get you only so far (and are not
| "searches").
|
| Why did DDG shutdown the community effort to extend IA when
| you say yourself that IAs are DDGs leverage?
| azalemeth wrote:
| Also: Thank you very much for making DDG. Thank you for
| _trying_ to help -- and being the springboard to others
| making the choice. I used to be a solid "advanced" googler,
| but made the switch ~3-4 years ago and haven't looked back.
| I'm glad to see your adoption has grown hugely.
|
| Some specific things that would help me a bit (I don't know
| if they exist!) -- these may well be pipe dreams, but...
|
| -- A decent search engine for mathematics in the form of
| LaTeX would be _amazing_...
|
| -- I'd enjoy being able to pass parameters to bangs
| specifically. An example would be Google Scholar (alas still
| the best and the last part of their ecosystem I use --
| doesn't seem to be as tied in to ads as the rest though) such
| as 'date from' and 'date to' parameters, with a sensible
| calling syntax, e.g. `!gsc;f:2015;t:- Convolutional Neural
| Nets`
|
| -- Likewise, a customisable, ideally API-able
| scientific/technical search interface would be very useful
| (for me).
|
| -- No big provider has tried to index the onionweb (I don't
| know if you're feeling that brave) -- I'd be interested to
| know
|
| Finally, are you considering being a privacy-first cloud
| provider in your own right, out of curiosity?
| kemonocode wrote:
| Thank you for taking the time to explain things at least. I
| don't personally rely that much on "instant answers"- at
| least for the things that I'm most likely to have to look up,
| but I can see why they're so useful.
|
| EDIT: Also, back to the point: any plans when it comes to
| only relying on Bing for images? That was the issue in the
| end- least how I understood it.
| yegg wrote:
| See https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1401216879293874185
| analyte123 wrote:
| It wasn't widely reported, but DuckDuckGo recently bought
| Yippy, which was a semi-decent search engine with its own
| crawler and index.
|
| edit: DuckDuckGo did not buy Yippy. Yippy.com seems to be
| defunct and just redirects to DuckDuckGo.com
| yegg wrote:
| This is actually a false rumor. We did not buy them, and we
| actually have had no relationship with Yippy.
| analyte123 wrote:
| Wow! At first when I saw the Yippy.com redirect to DDG,
| because it was so "sloppy" I had assumed the truth, which
| was they just shut it down and redirected. But this was
| falsely reported in a few places and even Wikipedia has an
| uncited claim that they were bought by you guys.
|
| It's kind of sad that they shut it down. They actually had
| a decent index and a unique "category" thing on the sidebar
| that you could use to narrow down search results.
| npteljes wrote:
| When using DDG I sometimes curse the bad results. Stupid DDG, I
| think, open google.com in a private tab, do my search, only to
| realize that google is not returning anything useful either.
| Modifying the keywords a bit, I get my results, and finally
| pasting the same keywords to DDG, surely, my results would have
| been the same too.
| approxim8ion wrote:
| Unverifiable privacy claims aside, I quite like that DDG is
| suitable for most (80%+) things I need to look up. Having !bangs
| to jump to wiki (or google) has been great too. That said, it is
| not without faults, even functionally.
|
| - Local search is naturally very poor, to the point that 100% of
| my local search traffic is still on Google.
|
| - Image search is nothing to write home about.
|
| - I'm not pleased that looking up something contentious/political
| more often than not brings up reactionary or false content. It's
| either bad news sources or low quality blogs.
|
| The last one might not be a problem to people whose opinions the
| results align with better but it is what it is. It's hard to say
| whether this is what the web would be without Google
| "censorship"/filter bubble stuff, or whether these are just the
| kinds of content the DDG (bing + other sources) algorithms have
| decided to rank ahead of them.
|
| Either way, it is an invaluable resource and an important one to
| have. Search is already extremely concentrated towards Google but
| ideally there should always be usable alternatives.
| hpoe wrote:
| I've found image search better, because every result isn't
| pintrest.
| andrewzah wrote:
| You can do "-pinterest.com" to avoid that.
| sprkwd wrote:
| Yes, but the fact we have to do that...
| latexr wrote:
| -site:pinterest.* is better. It filters the site
| specifically and includes all TLDs.
| dasfsi wrote:
| Even then, google likes to link to a twitter account (that
| is, main account) of some random person who reposted the
| image three months ago instead of the actual tweet, or
| author's twitter, or anything usable
| smoldesu wrote:
| After I realized you could theme DuckDuckGo, I switched.
| dont__panic wrote:
| Agreed, with one caveat: DDG image search, in my opinion, is
| far superior to Google Images because it still allows you to
| right click -> save image and right click -> open image in a
| new tab (and it actually opens the image, not the page that
| contains the image).
|
| Google Images has been deteriorating every year for over a
| decade now.
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| DDG has a better image search b/c Bing has a better image
| search and the grand majority of DDG results are just scraped
| Bing results.
| slongfield wrote:
| It's probably not scraped, FWIW--Bing has a paid API:
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/bing-web-search-
| ap...
|
| (Can't find a source indicating that they're using this,
| but I'd be surprised if they weren't.)
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| they're probably using it. with the volume of traffic
| they're using, and the fact Qwant and every other
| 'private' search basically uses Bing results, paying for
| API access makes the most sense.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| About Google Image, it stopped doing direct links as a result
| of a lawsuit by Getty Images. How does DDG get away with it?
|
| Another advantage of DDG/Bing is the ability to really turn
| off safe search. Unlike Google, it will not try to guess if
| you want nudity or not based on your search query, resulting
| in weird situations where you have to look for porn in order
| to get "anatomically correct" pictures.
| unknown_error wrote:
| In Google you can manually turn off safe search too
| https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/510/filter-
| expli...
|
| That forces it off no matter what your query is.
|
| I, err, only know this because of anatomy class homework.
| unknown_error wrote:
| If that's the only thing holding you back from Google Images,
| this is a useful extension:
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/view-
| image/jpcmhce...
|
| (not arguing for GI over DDG or any other image search, just
| pointing out that those UI issues -- which were coerced by
| publisher lawsuits, not Google's own preference -- can be
| trivially fixed with extensions)
| luke2m wrote:
| Exactly. The view file button is also very useful.
| eric-lee wrote:
| I don't use Google but as far as I can tell the behavior is
| very similar on both sites. (right click -> open image in new
| tab) on Google links directly to the image like DDG, though
| some are links to a data URL or cached versions of removed
| images on encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Image search is nothing to write home about
|
| DDG has my favorite image search.
|
| Generally, I haven't used Google in years. If DDG isn't finding
| something, I use some other privacy-oriented search engine.
| zaat wrote:
| My counter experience - after giving DDG a chance for more than
| two years, two days ago I replaced my default search browser to
| Google, and never looked back.
|
| In my experience I had to add g! to 90% of my search to get
| useful results, except for the most trivial searches. It was so
| much so that I would often add one in the beginning and one at
| the end, resulting in my google query ending up as "search term
| g!".
| moksly wrote:
| I was sort of in your boat, but is google really working out
| for you? It sure isn't working out for me. I still use it out
| of familiarity and because DDG isn't working either, but
| almost all the time that I want to find something that isn't
| on Wikipedia or related to me buying something, I end up
| needing to do multiple search typically ending up doing
| something like site:these-are-all-the-bees-in-the-world.com
| because I was trying to identify the huge bee my cat almost
| ate, not trying to buy honey, or bee coloured dresses, or
| plush bees or bee branded diapers or whatever else.
|
| Some of it isn't Google's fault or course, all the hobby
| stuff that happens in the blood bowl community group on
| Facebook never ends up in a search engine, but some of it is
| certainly Google's fault. I'm just not sure how much privacy
| helps though, sure DDG might not try to sell me diapers
| because their advertisers might not know I have a two year
| old, but it still tries to sell me honey.
| zaat wrote:
| Google isn't really working for me either. I mean, it isn't
| the effective tool it used to be in the distant past.
|
| Having saying that, yes, Google does work for me more than
| any of the alternatives and most of the times I can find
| even the most arcane and niche stuff I'm looking for, after
| investing few hours. Investing this level of efforts in DDG
| have never been fruitful and I have given up long ago
| trying anything but the most trivial stuff.
| tarsinge wrote:
| I use DDG as my main search engine since a year or two, and I
| add !g for 90% of my technical searches, but for everything
| else it's more like 10% or less.
| chayleaf wrote:
| i switched to a self-hosted searx instance and it was way
| better than ddg for me, although i do still have to switch to
| google in very rare cases
| zaat wrote:
| This does look interesting. I might give it a shot sometime
| soon
| kbelder wrote:
| "Never looked back" is a bit hyperbolic for an action you
| took two days ago, isn't it?
| zaat wrote:
| It's a comic nod referring to the common description of the
| experience shared by the DDG converts
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Instead of going to Google, if you are looking for local
| businesses in a particular category and their opening hours or
| contact information, then one recommendation that would
| preserve privacy is using OSMAnd on your phone for looking all
| that info up without requiring any network connection. Of
| course, that assumes that your community is well mapped on OSM.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I have DDG as my default, except sometimes I switch it back
| to G for a few days.
|
| I do something both odd and inefficient for local business
| search: I open the Apple Map app, and restaurants and other
| businesses show up, especially when I zoom in. I live in a
| small town, and seeing a map (with satellite imagery enabled,
| of course) and zooming in on different areas reminds me of
| where I might want to eat, etc. Fun.
| [deleted]
| pmoriarty wrote:
| My biggest problem with DDG (which has been my search engine of
| choice since it began) is that there's no way to verify its
| privacy claims.
|
| Ideally it would be continually audited by multiple trusted third
| parties.. something maybe like the EFF.
|
| Even then there'd be no guarantees, but it'd be way better than
| what users have now, which is just DDG's claims.
| deepstack wrote:
| >Ideally it would be continually audited by multiple trusted
| third parties.. something maybe like the EFF.
|
| For a for profit company, the third parties such as EFF would
| be good enough for most users. Would highly recommend that EFF
| offer some sort of certificate (PGP signed key would be fine)
| to authenticate such audit.
| jacobmarble wrote:
| I have switched to Neeva (neeva.com) which has no ads, because
| you are the paying customer. So far, it's been a great
| experience. I have had to get used to paying attention to the
| first few results, which are usually ads in Google or DDG.
|
| While there is no privacy audit that I'm aware of, the theory
| is that there is no motivation to sell my searching habits to
| anyone.
|
| DDG plans such a feature, but it will likely never be their
| primary revenue driver.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" While there is no privacy audit that I'm aware of, the
| theory is that there is no motivation to sell my searching
| habits to anyone."_
|
| They could sell your data for even more of a profit. Why
| couldn't that motivate them?
|
| Or they could do it to comply with some jurisdiction's laws.
|
| Or they could do it accidentally or as a leak from within.
|
| The best protection is that no data is collected in the first
| place, but we need auditing to make the claim of no
| collection credible.
| ghastmaster wrote:
| The greatest feature of DDG in my opinion is that it does not
| put you into a bubble. Results are the same regardless of
| what I have been searching lately. Does neeva allow you to
| toggle features like that?
| freediver wrote:
| Neeva's model is great but execution is suboptimal.
|
| Two examples:
|
| - While Neeva has no ads, they prioritize sites with tons of
| ads in their results (search for 'best laptop'). If your main
| premise is that ads are bad, why not penalize/remove second
| order sites that are heavy in ads?
|
| - They claim they respect user privacy, yet make technical
| choices like using raw Google maps in their product as Maps
| module, which sends requests from the client directly to
| Google
| soheil wrote:
| Every time a DDG article pops up on HN people start praising it
| and how it's 95% as good as Google, etc. DDG uses Google's and
| other search engines' data. DDG does not do their own crawling.
| Please do a quick search here on HN and read up on all the
| previous conversations about privacy and security implications of
| that before selling the narrative that DDG is somehow more
| awesome than more established search engines.
| Nicksil wrote:
| >DDG uses Google's and other search engines' data. DDG does not
| do their own crawling.
|
| >Please do a quick search here on HN and read up on all the
| previous conversations about privacy and security implications
| of that before selling the narrative that DDG is somehow more
| awesome than more established search engines.
|
| I'm not sure I understand your argument. What _are_ the privacy
| and security implications? If you submit a query and DDG turns
| around and gathers the results elsewhere, those other sources
| would have no idea it was you submitting the query; all they
| see is a request from DDG. Sounds like a better deal than
| directly exposing yourself to the sources you mention.
| soheil wrote:
| Is this true? Even if you're not exposed to those sources
| you're exposed to DDG instead, so are you saying they have
| somehow more moral grounds to stand on when it comes to not
| sharing user data with others given that they see no problem
| with taking Google data and semi-packaging it as their own in
| the first place?
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