351–360 of 475 posts
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I used them nearly exclusively and recommended them to all my friends. Once they started censoring content for political reasons (Ukraine), that ended instantly.
> censoring content for political reasons (Ukraine) what type of content did they censor? Do you have a link with more info?
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> 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?
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I think most DDG fans would be thoroughly surprised DDG ever popped the hood or tried to verify their privacy claims, which is why I don't think DDG ever will. Better to elude to a nebulous definition of privacy rather than give specifics. Even as a privately traded, for-profit company based in the U.S. with zero accountability for its claims, DDG doesn't even have that much IP to lose (as a Bing reskin) should it ev…
I always wondered the specifics of their deal with Microsoft regarding the use of bing index. Guess we will never know.
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…
It doesn't matter.
Why? Because when going through the exercise of identifying risks in the system one can't assume the actors are benevolent and won't ever use the access+data they have for evil.
That's not at all to say all actors are evil and will always do the most harm possible. Many risks are never exploited in practice. But that doesn't mean the risk doesn't exist. It still does! And it might be exploited in the future (with companies, all it takes is a reorg that puts someone less ethical in charge).
Thus, when doing your threat modeling exercise, for the purposes of identifying risk, assume the various actors could do as much damage as they possibly could with the access they have.
So concretely, when I evaluate risk on google vs. DDG: I won't take into consideration any "privacy respecting" marketing, that's not important. What matters is how much damage can each party do, which one is less risky?
Both get my search queries which is inevitable for a search engine. So there's that risk but it's a wash.
But google has its tendrils woven into far more points from which they can and will correlate data. Google analytics, AMP, gmail/gsuite, chrome (for people using that), also most people have an active login session with google most of the time, etc.
DDG has a much smaller footprint on the internet from which to correlate data.
Therefore, even assuming both parties are equally evil, DDG presents a smaller risk.
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I think it all comes down to the type of curation being done and if the choices are made out of objectivity of subjectivity. Like prioritizing a legitimate website over a scam website isn't punishing the scam website because of a controversial opinion or the search engine operator didn't like the content, it's because the website is objectively a scam, it's easy to objectively identify it as such, and everyone agrees…
> it's easy to objectively identify it as such [scams], and everyone agrees it's one. Is it actually easy to identify all scam content? Then why is it possible to find scams in search results? > When it comes to Ukraine vs. Russia and propaganda, it is entirely impossible to have objectivity. So should they treat every news outlet as equally ranked? Because I'm struggling to think of any news reporting that could be…
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I think some people are under the impression that it’s possible to build a useful search engine that is completely algorithmic and unbiased. It’s just not possible, though. Any algorithm for which there is incentive to game, people will game. And legitimate sources often have no incentive to game the algorithms. There’s no one algorithm that will do everything perfectly. Eventually you’ll have some phishing scam, lif…
I think it all comes down to the type of curation being done and if the choices are made out of objectivity of subjectivity. Like prioritizing a legitimate website over a scam website isn't punishing the scam website because of a controversial opinion or the search engine operator didn't like the content, it's because the website is objectively a scam, it's easy to objectively identify it as such, and everyone agrees…
Russia is discrediting truth as a concept entirely, the narrative being "we are obviously lying, but so is anyone else". That others might not be lying as much seems to be harder and harder to understand by the targets of these campaigns (based on firsthand witnessing). With objective facts / reporting discredited what's left is opinions. Opinions generated by a carefully managed army of influencers promoting whatever cause is deemed useful (from bloggers to friendly/financed foreign government officials). And this _is_ done with the secrecy and subtlety you'd expect.
It might not be possible to have complete objectivity regarding the invasion of Ukraine, but imho a blanket ban of any media with Russian ties would be a heck of a lot better than to let Russia continue to destroy objective reporting, one of the foundations of our modern society.
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I always wondered the specifics of their deal with Microsoft regarding the use of bing index. Guess we will never know.
What specifics? Wouldn’t they just pay MS for access to the API (though with some special volume discount that won’t be public)?
Well, after using DDG exclusively for web search since maybe 2014, I'll have to jump ship. I was never chuffed about them not using their own index, but removing priate sites and yt-dl, and the improving.duckduckgo.com business is exactly the type of behaviour I left Google for DDG over. I've liked what little of Brave Search I've used, but I'm not in love with Brave as a company either so perhaps I'll audition some…
It's interesting that Qwant never comes up in these discussions, they have their own engine and are privacy focused, looks very similar to Google but just never seems to be brought up?
[0] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-bing/help-w...
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So now we're going back to the central point. Before it sounded like you wanted me to "stop producing". Now from this reply, it sounds like you don't actually care if I stop producing, you're just objecting to me getting paid and demanding payment.
I'd be objecting anyone that gets paid to produce cultural pollution. Are you getting paid to produce cultural pollution?