211–220 of 248 posts
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?
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…
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…
* DuckDuckGo could be saying "We have a client from Kyrgyzstan, please give us an ad". Bing could be saying: Here is the heading, the body, and the URL. DDG could be dumping that in the page. Your privacy is not compromised.
* DuckDuckGo could be saying "We have a client from Kyrgyzstan and a client from Brazil and a client from Texas searching for 'plastic sponge bathtub' or 'green sponge bathtub' or 'green sponge beach'" in response to a search for "green sponge beach" from a Brazilian. Bing could be responding with several answers. DuckDuckGo would then send the relevant answer to the client.
* If you click on an ad, you have no privacy, end of story.
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)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I had the time I'd work on a Reddit clone without the new redesign and ads. Run it completely funded by Wikipedia-style donations, then turn it over to the community for governance. Reddit's money grabs piss me off. To bootstrap the thing I'd crawl Reddit and copy threads, users, subreddits, comments - everything. Users could prove account ownership or create any account that wasn't already allocated. If Reddit su…
Have you tried using some third-party app for Reddit? "Reddit is fun" works pretty great for me, no nonsense and good usability.
The risk that any app will, now or in the future, be hacked, sold or just changed to suck all the data from your phone and send it somewhere you don't want it sent is too high for my taste.
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…
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…
Another advantage of DDG: the result links are straight to the destination, unlike with Google where there's a tracking redirection in between. This is great on Android, as I can open the link straight in an app (like Wikipedia) without going to the page first and then launching the app.
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You made a slight logical leap there - how do you know the extension will even send any of your data to DDG for them to do something with?
the extension asks for the permission to access all that data.
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 100% agree with the reddit experience - it takes like 4 taps just to get to the #%!* page. No I don’t want your app shoved down my throat on every load. It has completely ruined reddit for me on mobile. Just show me ads if you need to and leave me alone.
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…
It's a bit annoying to have to zoom in on the results after every search, but that's still less annoying than trying to escape from AMP pages. And, no matter which engine I use, I have to deal with the crappy Reddit redesign - so that's still annoying.
On my desktop systems where I'm not constrained by the walled garden, I have browser extensions to redirect to old.reddit.com (because I don't want to sign in with an account everywhere) - but mostly, I am just looking forward to whatever will replace reddit hopefully some day soon.