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Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

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Re: Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

#181

Post by diffeomorphism »

0x008 wrote: post #180
pkamb wrote: post #137

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 th…

What's AMP?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages

> General criticism

AMP has been widely criticized by many in the tech industry[20][21][22][23][24][25][26] for being an attempt by Google to exert its dominance on the Web by dictating how websites are built and monetized, and that "AMP is Google's attempt to lock publishers into its ecosystem".[27] AMP has also been linked to Google's attempt to deprecate URLs so that users will not be able to immediately see whether they are viewing a webpage on the open Web or an AMP page that is hosted on Google's servers.[28]

Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, said: "there is a sense in which AMP is a Google-built version of the web. We are moving from a world where you can put anything on your website to one where you can’t because Google says so."[29] Ramon Tremosa, a Spanish member of the European Parliament, said: "AMP is an example of Google dialing up its anti-competitive practices under the nose of the competition regulators."[29]

Re: Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

#182

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

moksly wrote: post #170
pkamb wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMP's not that bad for, like, a local restaurant website or random news article or whatever. Fast and mobile friendly, when it might normally not be. Bit annoying if you want to copy the link, but whatever. Fine. But Reddit already has their own mobile site, and app. And half of the appeal of Reddit are the AMP-incompatible features such as voting and commenting! Why do they allow AMP to destroy their website?!

With reddit it’s extra annoying because once you’ve clicked through the amp, you still have to manually replace the www with old. I’m not sure how we ended up with an internet where you need to move through a search engine and two shitty mobile web apps to get to the page you wanted, but here we are.

You can set 'old' as a preference in your reddit account. It doesn’t seem to be 100% reliable, but it’s far better than all that url manipulation.

Re: Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

#183

Post by beefield »

Moru wrote: post #155
beefield wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No knowledge, but at least for my searches it has a definite edge against ddg. (I am European.) What I especially like is that in many cases qwant returns nothing if there is no exact match of my query (typically I made a typo.) I kind of like the feeling that the engine tries to search what I tell it to search, not what it thinks I want to search.

I like to be able to search things I have no idea how to spell. It's pretty easy to make a guess at spelling words and I want to at least have a suggestion below when something is wrong.

That's as easy as !g

Re: Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

#184

Post by kats »

thephyber wrote: post #57
jlarocco wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

DDG does use Bing for _some_ of their search results, but it's far from just a reskin.

I may be wrong, but I read before on HN than bing is used for 99% of the search results.

Re: Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

#185

Post by inapis »

apatters wrote: post #138
__ka wrote: post #36

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 be…

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 t…

I feel it’s because of network effects as well as inability to steal IP easily.

Network effects purely because once you have enough mass of people on board, you can easily attract more people and it is easy enough to distinguish yourself from your competitors that it deters people from switching and/or even being able to make a comparison.

Second you can’t easily steal IP. Anker making a next generation charger will have to face copycats who went to their OEM and were sold the design or the product itself from the backdoor. It’s simply difficult to keep things under wraps when it has a physical + human component. Not so easy in software. To substitute Instagram you’ll probably [0] have to write everything from scratch. Computers when configured correctly will not exactly sell your work from the back door.

[0] I mean source code is still stolen but it’s still marginally harder to use source code than just selling the stolen designs. Plus stealing source code works only once because the victim will then clamp down harder and then continue to innovate it’s way out of the mess.

Re: Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

#186

Post by diffeomorphism »

unicornporn wrote: post #84
thephyber wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG does use Bing for _some_ of their search results, but it's far from just a reskin.

DDG uses Bing, Yahoo! and Yandex for non bang searches[1]. As of October 2019, Yahoo! Search is once again “powered by Bing”[2]. To me, results are as crap as Bing's. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/6uaibg/comment/... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search

Uses as some of their main sources:

> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.

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

The results are very similar but not identical to using yahoo or bing.

Re: Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

#187

Post by diffeomorphism »

liambates wrote: post #44
__ka wrote: post #36

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 be…

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.

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

Re: Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

#188

Post by distances »

echelon wrote: post #175
distances wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried using some third-party app for Reddit? "Reddit is fun" works pretty great for me, no nonsense and good usability.

That may be, but how long do you expect them to allow 3rd party apps? Once they can get 3rd party usage below a certain threshold of engagement, they'll block the API.

They've been allowing for a good while so hopefully for a bit more at least.

TBH if they block third party I'm done with them. Def won't be accepting the default user experience.

Re: Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

#189

Post by Sverigevader »

echelon wrote: post #175
distances wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried using some third-party app for Reddit? "Reddit is fun" works pretty great for me, no nonsense and good usability.

That may be, but how long do you expect them to allow 3rd party apps? Once they can get 3rd party usage below a certain threshold of engagement, they'll block the API.

I bought Sync for Reddit to get rid of ads. I've used it for maybe two years. Even if they block it tomorrow it would have been worth it because the experience has been tremendous. If I'm forced to go back to the official app I'll just stop using Reddit on my phone.

And also, they'll get third party usage below a certain threshold if people don't use it so... Don't help them!

Re: Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo

#190

Post by Angostura »

pkamb wrote: post #137

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 th…

I hate AMP pages, but hadnt thought about using DDG to get rid of them. Switching now.
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