tbh if we want some competition to google we should support bing
Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
71–80 of 222 posts
Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
#72Is it common for distros to have deals with search providers in exchange for keeping them as the default in their browsers ?
I don't know, but that seems like a reasonable funding solution given that Google is expected to pay Apple ~$20B this year: https://dazeinfo.com/2022/01/05/google-pays-apple-for-not-la...
Apple has hundreds of millions of wealthy customers. Debian does not.
Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
#73Didn't DDG recently have some controversy about censoring things they didn't like related to Russia or Russian sites/news? I don't have links stored in history but it was fairly recent, it was their CEO on twitter I believe and they got a LOT of backlash.
> "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation. In addition to down-ranking sites associated with disinformation, we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) to highlight quality information for rapidly unfolding topics." https://twitter.com/yegg/status/150…
No post body was provided.
Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
#74Halleluiah?
Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not everyone who uses Debian also was the same person who installed it.
There are a few people (like me) who are crazy enough to give Linux desktop systems to real end users. Although I suppose I could just set their search engines for them, but that's just a pain.
Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
A Debian (or FSF, or ...) hosted SearX instance would indeed be interesting and perhaps most Free.
risiOS hosts a searx instance for its users and configures it as the default search engine. I worry about the sustainability of such a service though. Don’t they inevitably get blocked upstream? It might work better for more local organizations to host such projects. I’ve always liked the idea of community centers and churches and whatnot hosting shared services for their community.
/e/OS does too.
https://spot.ecloud.global
Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
They know the types of items you buy. You don’t get the exact items from Amazon. They can guess if you click a link to an iPhone and then later bought a $1,200 electronic but if you click on an iPhone and buy a PS5 they don’t know what you bought.
That’s not exactly true - as an Amazon affiliate you do see the exact items purchased under each of your specific tracking IDs, as well as the price it was purchased for, category and device group it was purchased using (desktop, tablet, mobile). This also includes any purchases the user makes in a 24 hour session of browsing after clicking your referral link to Amazon.
I’m unsure how many tracking IDs you can create in your account, and as far as I’m aware and can tell, you cannot pass specific UTM codes or other identifying information along with a click to Amazon that is passed back to you on the reporting side. Meaning, you could track users you send to Amazon, and where you’re sending them, and you can see outcomes, but Amazon only provides the tracking ID back to you as a reference (this ID is meant to be used on a site/channel wide level, but as I mentioned above could possibly be abused depending on how many you can create)
Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
#78There 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…
Privacy and ads/spam are different things.
DDG has ads based on your search query, that's how they make money. The difference is that they don't profile you, at least that's what they say. You can spam and respect people privacy, just by not looking who you are spamming.
And yes, "privacy" is a marketing ploy for anyone who is not Google. As for general purpose search engines, there are only two: Google and Bing, most others (including DDG) are just a front for Bing. There are other, more specialized crawlers including Marginalia whose author often posts on HN, and there is Yandex for Russia and Baidu for China, but the general idea is that if it is not Google, it is Bing.
Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
#79Didn't DDG recently have some controversy about censoring things they didn't like related to Russia or Russian sites/news? I don't have links stored in history but it was fairly recent, it was their CEO on twitter I believe and they got a LOT of backlash.
> "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation. In addition to down-ranking sites associated with disinformation, we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) to highlight quality information for rapidly unfolding topics." https://twitter.com/yegg/status/150…
I realize that due to own my unfortunate phrasing, how our news results rankings work have been highly misinterpreted since then. I subsequently put out a clarification thread (https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515635886855233537) and then we (DuckDuckGo) made a help page to explain how our news rankings actually work. I suggest anyone interested check it out (it’s short): https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...
In hope to quickly clear up some common misconceptions about them though: we don’t censor, we don’t move things so far down that they are effectively censored, we don’t have any definition of misinformation, and we don’t rank based on any political agenda or opinions (that includes mine!). This is just a summary though so would read the help page for details.
Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
#80DDG is for-profit and serves for the most part Bing results. Why not pick something truly open, like search.marginalia.nu?
> DDG is for-profit and serves for the most part Bing results
What’s the problem? What matters is that my searches aren’t recorded and added to a profile.