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DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

torrentfreak.com

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Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#121

Post by autoexec »

zagrebian wrote: post #87
derevaunseraun wrote: post #73

Question: does anyone actually know what DDG does with user data? Like they market themselves as a "privacy respecting" search engine, but how much of this is truth? I'd imagine there's good money in convincing people they have privacy because then they'll provide more interesting data. Has the company ever been audited? Why should they be trusted to not compromise user privacy? Imo at least Google is honest: you kno…

If Duck really collects user data, the moment this is found out, they’re dead, so for that reason alone, they probably don’t do it. The alternative is that they’re betting everything on nobody ever finding out which sounds crazy.

> If Duck really collects user data, the moment this is found out, they’re dead

It'd take a whistleblower for anyone to ever find out. What are the odds of that happening? I don't think we can count on someone who is being paid by a company to tell us about their actions when their livelihood/gravy train depends on it and they may be opening themselves up to legal problems for coming forward.

Not may people have the sort of integrity that folks like Snowden, Klein, or Tice demonstrated and even those that do can be pressured into keeping silent.

Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#123

Post by zodzedzi »

zionic wrote: post #95
zodzedzi wrote: post #69

I use DDG as my default search engine, along with NoScript in the browser. Often when I visit a new website, I peruse the (long) list of domains that the site is trying to pull javascripts from. I keep most of those source sites in UNTRUSTED status (including some of the big names in search/ads/etc). But I've always had DDG in the TRUSTED category because I had only seen its javascript before on the main DDG website.…

> So now I was wondering if DDG is getting into the tracking business Anecdotal of course, but I've been seeing more and more DDG billboards. Those things aren't cheap, and my trust in them has declined the more I see them advertise in the traditional market.

If they stick with billboards for advertising, I personally don't mind it. The issue to me is with tracking-based advertising(/anything).

Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#124

Post by KMag »

post-it wrote: post #89
KMag wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked on Google's indexing system, I can't imagine how much it would cost to write all of the crawling and indexing code from scratch, and then run it on over the visible web. You need to bootstrap somehow form an existing index if you want to get anywhere in any reasonable time. If there's a market for alternative search engines out there, AWS is already serving so much of the web that Amazon should really p…

That's an insanely good idea. Since behind the scenes, Amazon would know who owns each website that it's crawling, an AWS search database would inherently be better-curated and more trustworthy than anything an external crawler could put together. Having your website on AWS would be crucial for SEO. Awful for competition and whatnot.

Google and Bing can already crawl AWS sites just fine. As long as Amazon doesn't provide any first-party search engine, just providing search engine infrastructure, I think it would be a net win for competition.

As it stands, if you want to bootstrap your own search engine, you need to base your search engine on either Google or Bing's index, or perform the herculean task of making your own crawler+indexer+search engine. If Amazon can commoditize the back end, and let AWS-hosted search engines provide differentiators late in the indexing pipeline and on the search/serving side, I think we'd see more niche search engines spring up.

Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#126

Post by guyzero »

srvmshr wrote: post #39

Serious Question: How is the DDG search structured? Is it a cosmetic skin over Bing, or is it aggregating from other sites like Yahoo, ecosia etc additionally? If it is just Bing under the hood, how does it exist as business entity. I am sure MS will take some action to consolidate their search share rather than seeing splintered.

DDG does run ads just like Bing and Google, so it's just a way for Bing to get more search ad inventory out there.

Once upon a time there were other sites that did the same thing with Google, but eventually Google decided they didn't need third parties to drive search traffic.

Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#127

Post by s3p »

derevaunseraun wrote: post #73

Question: does anyone actually know what DDG does with user data? Like they market themselves as a "privacy respecting" search engine, but how much of this is truth? I'd imagine there's good money in convincing people they have privacy because then they'll provide more interesting data. Has the company ever been audited? Why should they be trusted to not compromise user privacy? Imo at least Google is honest: you kno…

I read about a Github issue [1] where someone reports that all websites a user clicks on to DDG servers. Reading the employee's response was eye opening.

They literally do not care if it has a bad look, they just say "we don't collect your personal information." What??? They are literally admitting to collecting domains in the feed of the Github issue but then just copy and paste their manifesto and expect us to think it's fine. I seriously do not understand this.

[1] https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/527

Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#128

Post by californical »

brewdad wrote: post #110
zionic wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So now I was wondering if DDG is getting into the tracking business Anecdotal of course, but I've been seeing more and more DDG billboards. Those things aren't cheap, and my trust in them has declined the more I see them advertise in the traditional market.

So where does one from here for everyday search? Google is out. Bing has many of the same problems as Google. Startpage blocks my VPN. Brave has always felt just a little "off" to me, but maybe they're worth a try. Any others I've missed that are worth looking into?

I found Kagi[0] from somewhere on HN -- they make pretty strong privacy claims, and are in a closed Beta stage right now (you can give them your email, and they'll send you a signup link within a week or two). They're planning to charge a fixed rate for their search engine once they're out of beta later this year.

So far, it seems to be working really well for me! Results are pretty excellent, and they support the DDG bang queries (like `!g`) if you ever need it

[0] https://kagi.com/

Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#129

Post by zarzavat »

paxys wrote: post #36
Apreche wrote: post #13

Someone should make a search engine that only indexes sites that Google and DuckDuckgo do not index. It would serve sort of the same purpose as like, lists of banned books.

This is the same line of thinking as "someone should set up an alternate social network where users don't get banned". Except that 99.9% of bans at Facebook, Twitter and the like are completely justified, and so that's what the dominant content on your new platform will be.

> Except that 99.9% of bans at Facebook, Twitter and the like are completely justified

Gonna need a big citation on that. One of my Facebook accounts got banned because I accidentally left my VPN on. Whilst I take responsibility for the terrible opsec, the fact is people get banned all the time for doing things that are anti-Facebook rather than anti-social (anti each other). I would definitely use a social network that doesn’t feel like a police state.

Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#130

Post by freediver »

tsuujin wrote: post #97
lolinder wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Kagi ( https://kagi.com ) for a few months and it's been great. It's free while in beta but will be funded by subscription fees afterward. The killer feature for me is the ability to up-rank and down-rank sites in my personal results, which has been really helpful for curating my tech-related searches. It allows me to quickly find high-quality docs and eliminate the garbage.

I’ve been using Kagi as my primary browser for a while. My only complaint about so far has nothing to do with Kagi itself, I just wish I could set it as my primary search engine in Safari.

You can, using (unofficial) Kagi for Safari extension.

https://github.com/marcocebrian/kagisearchsafari

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