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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

#141

Post by bscphil »

mattashii wrote: post #4
DiabloD3 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a Firefox bug (and a common one I've seen in other software). Tell me what organization. "Debian" would have been perfectly fine to show here.

How is that a Firefox bug if the software it is reported on is Chromium? Those are two very distinct projects.

They are referring to the fact that Firefox does the exact same thing as Chromium if certain settings are changed via enterprise policy. Here's a screenshot from my browser: https://i.imgur.com/pNMMKUC.png

I really don't understand why Debian wouldn't just patch the source code to change the default search engine rather than shipping an enterprise policy like this.

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

#142

Post by yegg »

torpid wrote: post #140
yegg wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m honestly not sure what you are referring to as the contrary or contradiction here. The referenced help page is the most complete explanation of how our news rankings work. Put another way, what would it take to convince you?

You were given a screenshot with quoted text from an article that returned completely buried results in your search engine from the same rt.com article. You first replied by giving a person a URL to the RT.com article to search in the engine which brought up a result. Then when someone called you out on it you then said you'd get back to them. Now today since I've linked this thread, you have now changed who could re…

I did not change any of my Twitter settings today.

Also, all I'm doing in that old thread (and this one) is doing my best to explain how our news rankings actually work. Again, currently the best and most thorough explanation is in this help page (more than can easily be put on Twitter): https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...

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

#143

Post by mdaniel »

vhgyu75e6u wrote: post #138
rlpb wrote: post #119

DDG is a more practical default than Google simply because I don't get a "We'd like to abuse your personal data" pop-up that gets in the way every time I open an Incognito window to search for something.

Sadly I have found the DDG lacking, most times I have to go back to Google to find information that just doesn't show up on DDG. As an example, I don't have Twitter but I follow certain sport journalist with a huge following, all thanks to his Twitter. When I search for his name + twitter, DDG shows me articles about the journalist and even a Facebook page link, but not his twitter even if it is in the query and his…

Did you use the "Send Feedback" in the bottom left corner? I've heard (via a comment on HN) that they do read them. I also readily admit the bottom left corner is a suboptimal place to put a feedback link, but here we are

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

#144

Post by mdaniel »

chasil wrote: post #103
teloli wrote: post #20

Context and rationale here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=956012

...slightly related question, what is the benefit of using the Debian package, versus the Ubuntu snap? As a CentOS user, the Ubuntu snap is updated much more often than the EPEL package.

I'm not a Debian user, but Ubuntu 22.04 tried to force snap down my throat with Firefox and it broke the hell out of everything. It turns out that a web-browser needs to run outside of a sandbox, who could have foreseen?!

Anyway, so now I just manage my own updates via the tar.gz because I can't be bothered to rebuild .deb for the releases and hope snap and its flatpak friend go the way of the dodo

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

#146

Post by _-david-_ »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #108
isaacremuant wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After DDG decided they would censor material they considered misinformation from Russia I went out search engine shopping and I'm using brave search. I value transparency and fairness and can make my own mind about things (I remember when being against the Iraq or Lybia wars made you a terrorist sympsthizer). Do you have any stance there? (I'm not saying you should have one or agree with mine, just curious. Every sea…

In general I'm not a big fan of censorship. I think it's ultimately counterproductive. It sends the message that the "truth" needs to be protected from independent scrutiny, effectively undermining the credibility of the institutions, while enabling crackpots to develop a persecution narrative. That said I do block some sites, mostly nazi stuff if it's designed in such a way that it crops up in regular searches. It's…

Do you have a list of the blocked domains?

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

#147

Post by godshatter »

zzo38computer wrote: post #126

I think that they will need to fork the web browsers and maintain the forks instead of the originals, in order to make improvements. This is one of them but is not only one. To actually make the web browsers good, will require further changes (sometimes involving adding stuff back in that was removed in older versions, or removing some of the newly added stuff while keeping some of it). However, I would prefer the de…

I wish they would have gone with search.brave.com, but DDG is also acceptable to me. The main reason I would have preferred brave.com has to with their using their own search engine for at least a portion of their results. I also like the discussions result they added.

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

#148

Post by mdaniel »

andrewfromx wrote: post #145

surprised this isn't changing to presearch.com. Google and DDG are great but the presearch concept of paying ME to do searches, I just love.

I can't recall a single 502 response that I've ever gotten from DDG, but plenty of them for presearch, to say nothing of their closed-source node software. I enjoy advocating new tech as much as the next person, but not "route searches through who knows what, and only respond to queries some of the time" worth

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

#149

Post by dymk »

blibble wrote: post #111
DannyBee wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, no? This is managed policy, and this is a 100% good way of letting the user know that someone else has control of their settings Just because Debian thinks that they are doing the right thing, they are in fact, controlling the user's settings through a policy It's just telling you that, as it should. The notion that it has anything to do with keeping search the default or not is like, such a silly assumption i do…

> a 100% good way of letting the user know that someone else has control of their settings ah, so it should also be displayed if it's set to Google's preferences they're "someone else" as equally as Debian

Debian just didn’t adjust the defaults correctly.

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

#150

Post by danShumway »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #133
tremon wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if they do server-side profiling, they can only track you on duckduckgo.com. Last I checked, DDG did not also own an analytics service that has infested half the world's websites.

> Last I checked, DDG did not also own an analytics service that has infested half the world's websites. uMatrix shows a 3rd party request to improving.duckduckgo.com every time I visit a page from DDG search results, ostensibly to measure click-through rate. This is claimed to be anonymous, but in principle it gives DDG the opportunity to log much about their users' browsing habits.

Even in the worst case scenario you propose, where DuckDuckGo is deliberately lying and collecting more information than they claim and where those clickthrough requests are sending as much information as is possible for them to send, this is still exposing you to way less risk than Google Analytics.

It is still, I would claim, objectively more private to use DuckDuckGo than Google even in a world where they are lying about their privacy policies, purely because DuckDuckGo does not have the same surveillance scope and level of infrastructure as Google.

And that's really what we're arguing about here, unless you have a more private alternative to DuckDuckGo that has been subject to more rigorous audits and can scale to support being the default search engine for a bunch of nontechnical users?

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