DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public • Hacker News Board

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#11

Post by yegg » Tue, Oct 18, 2022, 2:43 PM UTC

tinza123 wrote: post #4

What is this, a browser? Why do I need a new browser?

Here's a tl;dr for you on "why do I need a new browser" from the post:

* Better web tracking protections: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we.... This includes a bunch of protections not offered by most other browsers and extensions by default (e.g., embedded facebook content protection), or more robust versions of them (e.g., our HTTPS everywhere list is orders of magnitude bigger). More generally our web tracking protections are based on our open source crawler vs. community feedback, and we believe this approach is ultimately better and leads us to study and block new tracking techniques faster.

* New feature: Duck Player, a YouTube player that helps protect your privacy (no targeted ads, no influencing your recommendations, etc.)

* New feature: automatic cookie consent pop-up manager, which not only hides these but also makes sure to select the most private options before doing so (if you don't do that you can be subject to more tracking).

* New feature: Fire Button, one click data clearing for tabs, windows, sites, or everything.

* Our Email Protection integrated natively: https://spreadprivacy.com/protect-your-inbox-with-duckduckgo....

* A focus on Privacy, simplified, which means working continuously on not breaking websites while still protecting you as much as we can, and keeping the interface clean and sleek.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#12

Post by yegg » Tue, Oct 18, 2022, 2:44 PM UTC

elashri wrote: post #8

yegg wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was indeed hard to describe. When people say they "use Webkit", people seem to take away some kind of direct incorporation of Webkit code. That's not the case here in that we haven't forked anything.

So can you describe in a little detail on what exactly are you doing? I'm not sure if you have plans to open source the browser or not?

Yes, we plan to open source as we come out of beta. It's similar to our iOS app/browser, which is already open source here: https://github.com/duckduckgo/ios

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#13

Post by TobyTheDog123 » Tue, Oct 18, 2022, 2:47 PM UTC

yegg wrote: post #6

seanw444 wrote: post #3

I used to be a fan of DuckDuckGo. I mained it as my search engine for a long while because it was better for privacy, and it gave me my choice. Then, they decided that they were the arbiters of truth, and they'd start censoring "Russian disinformation campaigns." Because apparently that's important to them. The fact that they also get most of their results from Bing also subtracts points. I also eventually realized t…

(I'm the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo.) It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but I subsequently put out a clarification tweet[1] and then we made this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-…

I don't know how you claim that you have not made yourselves the arbiters of truth after posting tweets like https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318

"At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation"

and

"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"

Your post here and your tweets tell completely contradictory stories, which only harms your credibility more.

A search engine does have to make a judgement call on what results to rank over other results. However, making that call based on anything but relevancy to the user's query means I'm not going to take your search engine seriously. If anyone but the user is deciding what "russian disinformation" is, you've already lost the game.

Personally, that's fine for me: I don't have to take my search engine seriously to use it, and I dont turn to search engines for my news anymore. In fact, I think the only things I use engines for these days are a replacement for the StackOverflow search bar...

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#14

Post by sholladay » Tue, Oct 18, 2022, 2:48 PM UTC

elashri wrote: post #2

> All the app code – tab and bookmark management, our new tab page, our password manager, etc. – is written by our own engineers. For rendering, it uses a public macOS API, making it super compatible with Mac devices. Is this a new way of saying that they use Webkit?

For all practical purposes, yes.

Technically, the article links to the WKWebView class. So it sounds like they aren’t directly using WebKit, but rather WebView, a cross-platform API that delegates rendering to the OS preferred rendering engine, which on Apple devices happens to be WebKit.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#15

Post by user3939382 » Tue, Oct 18, 2022, 2:51 PM UTC

yegg wrote: post #6

seanw444 wrote: post #3

I used to be a fan of DuckDuckGo. I mained it as my search engine for a long while because it was better for privacy, and it gave me my choice. Then, they decided that they were the arbiters of truth, and they'd start censoring "Russian disinformation campaigns." Because apparently that's important to them. The fact that they also get most of their results from Bing also subtracts points. I also eventually realized t…

(I'm the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo.) It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but I subsequently put out a clarification tweet[1] and then we made this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-…

> censoring stories due to operating with very limited press freedom, and misleading readers about who owns, funds, and authors stories for the site

So does this mean you're going to deprioritize The Hill for firing Katie Halper because she wanted to do a story calling the Israel/Palestine regime apartheid?

Or the Washington Post owned by Bezos who is paid untold fortunes by the US intelligence apparatus, and whose reporter listed her news agency as "Amazon" on a sign in sheet to interview Assange?

Do you consider RT (a huge Russian news network) misleading about who "owns, funds, and authors its stories"?

I'm sorry, but I don't think you "accidentally made a bad tweet" -- you tried to publicly jump on the Ukraine bandwagon for cheap political points, it backfired, and you've been backpedaling ever since.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#16

Post by loceng » Tue, Oct 18, 2022, 2:55 PM UTC

TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #13

yegg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo.) It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but I subsequently put out a clarification tweet[1] and then we made this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-…

I don't know how you claim that you have not made yourselves the arbiters of truth after posting tweets like https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318 "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation" and "we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) t…

Do you know if DDG also did the same - or perhaps their rankings were already captured by the likes of Reuters et al ("fact checkers") - for the COVID pandemic narrative?

It's quite apparent their desired narrative is falling apart now, where a Pfizer executive publicly admitted they didn't even test for transmissabiity - meanwhile that was arguably the primary promotion point for the mRNA shots propagated by the captured MSM (arguably primarily by big pharma), by politicians (captured heavily by big pharma, enough to be toeing their line); and where Pfizer's CEO at last minute cancelled his in-person testimonial to EU parliament inquiry - arguably because they know they've been caught and will be held accountable by those who aren't toeing their line/profiting from it.

This is the "new" war using "soft" power, a war against all of society that arguably billions of people are now awake to; which speaking of it gets you flagged and lazily downvoted as "conspiracy theorist" to suppress a seemingly endless and growing amount of concrete proof points to support the hypothesis of what's actually going on.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#17

Post by yegg » Tue, Oct 18, 2022, 2:57 PM UTC

user3939382 wrote: post #15

yegg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo.) It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but I subsequently put out a clarification tweet[1] and then we made this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-…

> censoring stories due to operating with very limited press freedom, and misleading readers about who owns, funds, and authors stories for the site So does this mean you're going to deprioritize The Hill for firing Katie Halper because she wanted to do a story calling the Israel/Palestine regime apartheid? Or the Washington Post owned by Bezos who is paid untold fortunes by the US intelligence apparatus, and whose r…

No, as it says on that referenced help page: "Many sites may occasionally do one or more of these things, but we take action very rarely, only in the most extreme cases...We trust that users can find the right information for themselves, so even in these rare cases we do not remove these sites from our search results page. Additionally, impacted sites are not moved so far down in the results that they are effectively removed. Unless legally prohibited, you should find all media outlets in our results, and they should generally show on top if you search for them by name or domain name. If you see otherwise, please let us know and we will investigate."

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#18

Post by jasonlotito » Tue, Oct 18, 2022, 3:02 PM UTC

TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #13

yegg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo.) It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but I subsequently put out a clarification tweet[1] and then we made this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-…

I don't know how you claim that you have not made yourselves the arbiters of truth after posting tweets like https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318 "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation" and "we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) t…

There was an update clarifying that tweet.

https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515637392190935041

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#19

Post by TobyTheDog123 » Tue, Oct 18, 2022, 3:11 PM UTC

loceng wrote: post #16

TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how you claim that you have not made yourselves the arbiters of truth after posting tweets like https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318 "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation" and "we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) t…

Do you know if DDG also did the same - or perhaps their rankings were already captured by the likes of Reuters et al ("fact checkers") - for the COVID pandemic narrative? It's quite apparent their desired narrative is falling apart now, where a Pfizer executive publicly admitted they didn't even test for transmissabiity - meanwhile that was arguably the primary promotion point for the mRNA shots propagated by the cap…

I'm not very inclined to discuss mRNA on a tech forum, but "fact-checkers" do also fall under this kind of umbrella, yeah.

Any large organization presenting what they claim to be the truth is subject to all sorts of unscientific biases, which is why it's so important that people aren't shouted down, that sites aren't de-ranked.

If you let anyone but individual people decide their conclusions, it's a nice, paved, flower-laden walkway to the dystopian corporate hellscape that's bemoaned by the same people who advocate for "fact checkers" and de-ranked search results.

P.S. For those who believe that putting "fact-checkers" in quotes is denying truth, promoting misinformation, etc, etc -- I put it in quotes because even giving them that title gives them more power than they should have.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#20

Post by loceng » Tue, Oct 18, 2022, 3:17 PM UTC

yegg wrote: post #17

user3939382 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> censoring stories due to operating with very limited press freedom, and misleading readers about who owns, funds, and authors stories for the site So does this mean you're going to deprioritize The Hill for firing Katie Halper because she wanted to do a story calling the Israel/Palestine regime apartheid? Or the Washington Post owned by Bezos who is paid untold fortunes by the US intelligence apparatus, and whose r…

No, as it says on that referenced help page: "Many sites may occasionally do one or more of these things, but we take action very rarely, only in the most extreme cases...We trust that users can find the right information for themselves, so even in these rare cases we do not remove these sites from our search results page. Additionally, impacted sites are not moved so far down in the results that they are effectively…

But how isn't this disingenuous? The reason you'd de-rank is because less users then get exposed to whatever narratives/information you want hidden, the reason why you de-rank.

Users use a search engine for passive exposure to a mix of information for them to then scan, ideally reviewing multiple sources thoroughly, for them then to make a determination/conclusion.

And certainly DDG would have actual statistics on the direct impact the down-ranking had/has, but not the statistics on the externalized impact of how that cascades - e.g. you're biasing their knowledge towards whatever has become the dominant/"acceptable" narrative and reducing the likelihood (greatly) by who sees competing narratives.

In general with searches, what % of clicks occur within say the first 2-3 pages, and were the Russian sites de-ranked to after those 2-3 pages?

Where do 80% of the clicks go for most search - within how many pages of results? Were the sites de-ranked passed that point?