DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

Yahoo, the company that saves your unsent and deleted email drafts forever and will turn them over to law enforcement even though they say that should be impossible?

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-deleted-yahoo-emails-le...

Maybe Yahoo is sincere in their privacy pledge, maybe they're not, but one thing has already been proven: they don't have a good enough grasp of how their own servers work to make that promise.

Very disappointed in DuckDuckGo. I expect they won't be around for too much longer, much like Yahoo.

Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#5

Post by rmason » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 2:03 AM UTC

I do sure hope that any agreement DDG has made with Yahoo doesn't get cancelled by their eventual new owner.

But if Dan Gilbert ends up being the buyer my guess is that he'd actually like Gabriel Weinberg enough to continue. Not so much with Verizon or the private equity firms bidding.

Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#6

Post by frank_jaeger » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 2:03 AM UTC

AndrewWarner wrote: post #2

Does this mean that Yahoo results appear in DDG? Will DDG power Yahoo search in any way?

From the "technical implementation" article they link to

>When you do a search on DuckDuckGo, depending on the particular search, we will make a call to Yahoo for links, ads and other content.

Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#7

Post by tacos » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 2:04 AM UTC

And so it ends. The mere act of partnering with Yahoo indicates desperation and signals poor decision making.

I'm not sure I understand HN's fascination with this site but this is not a good sign for those who claim to use it in these never-ending threads.

Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#8

Post by organic_tech34 » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 2:07 AM UTC

Privacy Statements are the tech equivalent of calling food organic.

You need a reputable third party to audit your practices. Or your software needs to be open source so anyone can see what you're doing.

I'll be switching from using DDG because of this. I don't trust Yahoo, and I barely trust DDG.

Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#9

Post by ra1n85 » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 2:07 AM UTC

Always loved DuckDuckgo - kinda came across as a search engine that didn't seek to takeover the world, and only sought to fill a (necessary) niche. That seems more genuine than "don't be evil".

Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#10

Post by pwnna » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 2:11 AM UTC

I think a better link to explain is here: https://duck.co/help/results/yahoo-technical-implementation

It looks like they are just querying yahoo for results and ads as a proxy and it sounds like, through some contractual/technical limitations, they have to make that request from a yahoo controlled domain name (duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net). However, they say they fully control the server and yahoo does not get to touch it, as yahoo delegated DNS to them.

The change does not seem malicious and if what they say is true, then the implementation might not be too bad. The volume of traffic they get probably means you cannot profile an individual from Yahoo's side. However, this potentially means that your search history is leaked to Yahoo, albeit in an aggregate manner with other DDG users, which may have attacks that I'm not aware of.

What I can see, however, is a lot of noscript users get startled by this change as they will see DDG use a script from yahoo.net (actually duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net) as by default noscript does not show the full domain.