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Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

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Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#61

Post by mrweasel »

garciasn wrote: post #34
bla3 wrote: post #13

DDG is for-profit and serves for the most part Bing results. Why not pick something truly open, like search.marginalia.nu?

Because the results from search.marginalia.nu are absolutely irrelevant?

It would also crash marginalia I think. Which would be sad.

What would we have Debian change the default search to? I get that DuckDuckGo might not be ideal, but it is better than Google, Bing, Yahoo or Marginalia. The results need to be good enough, but also not obviously anti-privacy. It basically leave you with DuckDuckGo, Qwants or Ecosia. Personally I might had picked Ecosia, had they not had a cookie banner.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#62

Post by judge2020 »

gouggoug wrote: post #57

Wouldn't changing the default search engine to "no default" be a solution too? I'm sure many people have thought about it, so, I wonder, what is the issue with this approach?

The year of the Linux desktop gets further away as people try to use their browser and go “why can’t I search” and drop it all together. A lot of people really don’t have the patience to configure their computers, they want it to ‘just work’.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#63

Post by wheelerof4te »

striking wrote: post #35
wheelerof4te wrote: post #33

Did they fix the bug that did not allow you to log on to your Google account and sync from Chromium? Or was that intentional?

That's something Google did to Chromium, not Debian.

Ah, thank you.

That's a shame.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#64

Post by kyrra »

bityard wrote: post #50
kyrra wrote: post #43

Googler, opinions are my own. I don't work on chrome or anything related. Many companies put out free software to drive people towards their products, and Chrome with Google Search seems to be one of those. As many know, improving and maintaining Chrome is not free, and having Google Search being a default is one part of what helps pay for this work. Yes, this is Google, yes, this is likely a tiny drop in the bucket…

Chromium isn't just gratis software ("free" has a different meaning), it's open source software. There is no implicit expectation that downstream users can't change it any way want[1] and redistribute the result, that's the whole point of the open source license that Chromium is released under. 1. Within existing legal boundaries, of course

Chromium is distributed under the 3-clause BSD license, so I totally agree with you that distros can do whatever they want with it (more details here: https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/licensing/ ). I'd imagine many people that work on Chromium would agree with this and are happy for distros to do what they'd like. If Google wanted to be pushy with the software, it could do some other kind of licensing saying people couldn't modify it and still use the Chromium branding, but they obviously chose not to do this.

My take from a business perspective is that Google produces Chrome and Chromium for a number of reasons. Good will to the community (with how permissive they are with the license), and having a stable platform to be able to build things like GMail and Search on-top of. But there is also the Ads side that benefits from Google Search being the default.

So I guess there are really many benefits for Chrome's existence, and Google Searching being a default is only part of that. But I still stand by my original post and reasoning.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#65

Post by MichaelCollins »

sascha_sl wrote: post #29
aendruk wrote: post #2

Some unintended consequences: > This change caused my chromium browser to report that it's being managed by my "organization". I thought that my machine was somehow compromised. This is terrifying! I wound up deleting my entire chromium profile before I discovered that the root cause was this DuckDuckGo config change. https://bugs.debian.org/956012

Fedora did this for a while to inject the word "Fedora" into the User Agent. They eventually stopped because users were similarly spooked.

Putting even more identifying information into User Agent strings seems completely insane, who's interests is that meant to serve? The number of people in any town with Fedora in their UA must be minuscule, that blows a huge number of 'privacy bits', and for what?

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#66

Post by zaphar »

ncmncm wrote: post #55

There was a posting on HN not long ago warning that DDG was run by spammers, and that the "privacy" focus is purely a marketing ploy. This should be predictable on the basis that it is a free service, making you the product, and somebody else , therefore, the customer. It is hard to know what else one can do to get useful search functionality. It has been a long time since Google dropped any emphasis on usefulness. A…

I can find no actual evidence that DDG is run by spammers. This does not strike me as credible.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#67

Post by gouggoug »

judge2020 wrote: post #62
gouggoug wrote: post #57

Wouldn't changing the default search engine to "no default" be a solution too? I'm sure many people have thought about it, so, I wonder, what is the issue with this approach?

The year of the Linux desktop gets further away as people try to use their browser and go “why can’t I search” and drop it all together. A lot of people really don’t have the patience to configure their computers, they want it to ‘just work’.

Yea I guess. Though I'm having a hard time with the idea that someone who went through the trouble of running on Debian in the first place would have this reaction to the browser not automatically opening a search engine.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#68

Post by tristan957 »

xuhu wrote: post #8

Is it common for distros to have deals with search providers in exchange for keeping them as the default in their browsers ?

As reported in an earlier comment, DDG did not make a deal with Debian for this.

Prior art is that Linux Mint at one point had Yahoo as the default search engine in their Firefox builds. I am not sure whether that is currently the case.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#69

Post by blibble »

kyrra wrote: post #43

Googler, opinions are my own. I don't work on chrome or anything related. Many companies put out free software to drive people towards their products, and Chrome with Google Search seems to be one of those. As many know, improving and maintaining Chrome is not free, and having Google Search being a default is one part of what helps pay for this work. Yes, this is Google, yes, this is likely a tiny drop in the bucket…

> but at the same time, it's taking away potential revenue from Google.

many of us see this as a positive

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#70

Post by cmeacham98 »

ncmncm wrote: post #55

There was a posting on HN not long ago warning that DDG was run by spammers, and that the "privacy" focus is purely a marketing ploy. This should be predictable on the basis that it is a free service, making you the product, and somebody else , therefore, the customer. It is hard to know what else one can do to get useful search functionality. It has been a long time since Google dropped any emphasis on usefulness. A…

Regardless of whether you are right or wrong about DDG:

Doesn't this line of logic lead to every free site being evil, including the one we're talking on?

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