Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by shadowgovt » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 2:07 PM UTC

npteljes wrote: post #207

shadowgovt wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite thing is when a government "solves" a market problem by incentivizing forcing a user to choose when most don't care It worked great for cookies in the EU. Really improved my browsing experience.

Seems like it's either covert surveillance (before the EU cookie thing), or manipulated consent surveillance. I personally improved my browsing experience with the Consent-o-matic addon, which knows some of these cookie modals, and fills them for me according to my preset (which is to deny all cookies). Also, people not caring should not be a baseline. People are ignorant about the vast majority of things going on, a…

> People are ignorant about the vast majority of things going on, and yet they are much better off if those are taken care of by people who actually give a damn

No disagreement there, I just think the GDPR rules that led to ubiquitous cookie consent dialogs were indicative of policymaking by people who didn't fit that category. It should have been easy to predict this outcome from that policy.

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

#212

Post by rpdillon » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 2:26 PM UTC

unknownaccount wrote: post #187

rpdillon wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> open-source the entire search index db and accompanying webserver software, making it easy for users to setup their own local instance of DDG which is actually auditable Easy to self-host? How large do you suppose the Bing index is, for example? Simply storing the index would be an immense undertaking beyond the reach of probably everyone who has ever self-hosted anything, ever. This ignores the compute required to…

Yet somehow search engines like Google and AskJeeves existed and worked alright 20+ years ago on hardware 1/1000th as powerful as it is today.

That was a very different internet. Search engines aren't something you build once and then you just have them. Constant, extensive work is necessary. It's quite literally a global-scale task to do this effectively.

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

#213

Post by troad » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 2:33 PM UTC

unknownaccount wrote: post #104

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a legit company based in Pennsylvania, not some random website. Their privacy policy explicitly states they do not collect user info. If they are caught doing it anyway they could be open to legal action. While they may be lying, at least it's better than other search engines where collecting data is explicit and built into their business model. edit: I should have just down-voted and moved on.

That doesnt mean anything. I can go ahead and register an LLC in Pennsylvania too for a few hundred bucks and then put up a website with a completely fictional privacy policy. I could collect everyones IPs depite claims that we do not, and no one would be able to prove it.

I don’t understand why folk seem to think that admitting they are capable of fraud is some kind of dunk.

I mean - yea. Maybe your dentist never actually graduated dental school. Did you call the dental association to check he’s a member? Anyone can just print out a certificate on their home printer and put it on their wall, y’know. And even if he is, do you think the dental association actually called his college to verify the transcript he gave them when he joined in 1988 or whatever?

You really should do an independent audit of your dentist’s dentistry skills. Perhaps you should demand he does some kind of standardised test. But he can’t just go to a testing centre, you have no way of verifying that. He must do the test in front of you.

And how do you know the answers to the standardised test are correct, anyway? You will need to do a dentistry degree yourself first.

TLDR: A trustless society doesn’t work, and most people aren’t out to pull one over you.

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

#214

Post by fomine3 » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 2:51 PM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #208

fomine3 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe DDG is good replacement for English users, but I wonder does debian developers considered is it fine for global users.

Of course they do, when the alternative is Google. Do you want to try and argue that Google is a more private search engine than DDG outside of the US?

privacy isn't the only one criterion to choose search engine. If search quality is very poor for a language, it's not suitable even if it's privacy oriented.

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

#215

Post by danShumway » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 3:00 PM UTC

fomine3 wrote: post #214

danShumway wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they do, when the alternative is Google. Do you want to try and argue that Google is a more private search engine than DDG outside of the US?

privacy isn't the only one criterion to choose search engine. If search quality is very poor for a language, it's not suitable even if it's privacy oriented.

Sure, but that's really a separate conversation than what this thread has been talking about so far -- which is whether or not we can trust that DDG is more private than Google.

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

#216

Post by wusher » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 4:20 PM UTC

yegg wrote: post #79

blamazon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

it was announced in a very political way at a time when everyone was trying to earn social points by supporting the other side. there was no mention of downranking disinformation released by the other side. i had been using ddg since probably 2017 and i switched that day.

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

#217

Post by unknownaccount » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 8:34 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #195

unknownaccount wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>self hosting isn't feasible for 99% of the population Its only this way because companies have a vested interest in keeping it like that. It's how they make their money. It is absolutely within the realm of possibility that people host their own search engine. 99% of people know how to install Google Chrome right? this should be no different. The entire search engine & webserver stack it depends on could be bundled…

Sure, the problem with installing a local search engine is the installer technology. It can't be the petabyte of index information that the search engine actually needs, and the petaflops of CPU it would need to search through it. Everyone has a PB of SSD disk space, some few TB of RAM and a few thousand CPUs to throw at the search problem, or is happy to type in a search query and give a 16 core CPU a few days to ex…

I don’t know why you are framing this as an impossible task. It doesn’t need to be on the scale of Bing/Google to function. There are already some self-hosted search engine solutions that work okay. Just filter out all the trash sites with low quality content like Facebook/Twitter from the database and that 300TB common crawl could probably be cut down to a more reasonable 200TB. Filter out non-English results and it probably halves it further. I’m seeing 8TB drives on Newegg for $129. It absolutely does not take anywhere on the order of “days” to query a properly optimized db of this size.

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

#218

Post by unknownaccount » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 8:42 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #194

unknownaccount wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet somehow search engines like Google and AskJeeves existed and worked alright 20+ years ago on hardware 1/1000th as powerful as it is today.

I wouldn't be surprised if the indexed subset of Facebook alone were more than 1000x larger than all of the indexed web 20 years ago. The web in general has probably expanded many millions or hundreds of millions of times.

Personally I wouldn’t mind if trash/spam sites like Facebook/Twitter were omitted from the database. As well as non-English content, being as though I only speak English. Remove trash/spam/non-english from the db and the size of that 300TB will be cut down substantially to the point it is feasible for a single person to store. After all, even if somebody wanted to store the whole 300TB db would cost about $4000 in hard drives which is not as totally out-of-reach as some people here are making it seem.

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

#219

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 10:14 PM UTC

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #159

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…

"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." But by default isn't Google controlling the user's setting through a policy. The policy includes, among other things, the rule that Google is the default search engine. (Needless to say, that setting is a cash cow.) And in fact, the user that ma…

Probably was not specific enough here. Chrome binary on ChromeOS. The anticompetitive, manipulative tactics are reminiscientof Microsoft's including Internet Explorer in Windows.

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

#220

Post by GuB-42 » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 11:10 PM UTC

I don't mind the idea of changing the default search engine to DDG, but not in a stable release, do that in testing.

It is opinionated choice, not a bug fix, and definitely not a security update (severity: wishlist). I don't have a problem with maintainers having opinions, but on a stable distribution like Debian, I would have preferred they expressed them before the freeze.