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DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

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Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#41
post #18

Google's strategy is to profit from advertising. It fundamentally benefits from knowing as much about its users as possible. Every tactic it has will always support that strategy or it will risk failure. You can tell its strategy motivates it toward evil (its term, not mine), because its slogan is "Don't be evil." It chose that slogan because it risks being evil, in its own terms. It doesn't need a slogan like "Don't…

You're actually confusing a couple of things. Advertising has very little to do with it. Say for the sake of argument they had no advertising and charged you $1 per month for a subscription to use Google. They'd still have the same challenge. That is, they are privy to their users most private thoughts - more so than nearly any other business or service in life. With that knowledge comes great responsibility and risk. Employees could be drawn into schemes to provide political, social, business or criminal networks with information on what citizens are thinking. It's sensible to drive that point home on a daily basis in your culture. In a way it's reassuring that they understand that rather than be flippant about it.

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#43
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why bother asking DDG itself when traffic can be intercepted and logged at their ISP?

IIRC HTTPS would encrypt your data from your ISP.

Until PRISM subpoenas DDG and gets their private keys -- after which they can decrypt the SSL traffic.

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#44
post #18

Google's strategy is to profit from advertising. It fundamentally benefits from knowing as much about its users as possible. Every tactic it has will always support that strategy or it will risk failure. You can tell its strategy motivates it toward evil (its term, not mine), because its slogan is "Don't be evil." It chose that slogan because it risks being evil, in its own terms. It doesn't need a slogan like "Don't…

Whatever you feel about Google's actions, there's no need to concoct elaborate stories around and speculative theories about the origin of Google's 'don't be evil' slogan. You can look it up. According to http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-07-16-n55.html , the 'don't be evil' slogan came from Paul Buchheit, who was brand-new to the company when he proposed it at a corporate-values brainstorming meeting. This meeting…

I agree with the parent commenter: the fact that "don't be evil" was adopted suggests strongly that there is a motivation to be evil that needed to be overcome (and that users could identify with).

The company storytelling that goes along with the slogan doesn't matter, and nor does it matter that it's intended mainly as a jab at competitors in the same industry.

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#45

Too bad the actual search results are not relevant at all. I tried searching for something and I switched back to Google in the end.

For the searches that don't bring relevant results, I choose the "Give Feedback" option and report Bad Results. Then I add "!g" to the search and continue.

I will try that out, but just like the parent, I really struggle using DDG because it truly is not returning the results I am looking for.

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#46

Too bad the actual search results are not relevant at all. I tried searching for something and I switched back to Google in the end.

For the searches that don't bring relevant results, I choose the "Give Feedback" option and report Bad Results. Then I add "!g" to the search and continue.

you should try !sp since it works like !g but passes through https://startpage.com/ (proxied google result)

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#47
post #6
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I recall correctly, DDG claims not to keep a record of your searches, so a subpoena would not provide anyone with much information.

Yep, exactly. Now, this makes me wonder: What could be an equivalent implementation for e-mails. An e-mail host that encourages immediate download, totally deletes e-mail contents, deletes logs of any sort, etc. when you delete messages?

That's pretty close to what riseup.net does.

https://help.riseup.net/en/privacy-policy

Of course, you have to trust them to actually do that.

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#48
Google has more information security engineers than ddg has all engineers. Same goes for Facebook and Microsoft. What makes HN think the NSA and/or China and/or Somali pirates haven't completely owned every server at ddg? Why do you think that just because ddg doesn't log anything implies that your ddg accesses aren't logged by third parties?

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#49
I actually switched to DuckDuckGo because the Chrome team decided to make using a Google a worse experience than using any other search engine in the latest beta client.

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=230607

Unfortunately, DuckDuckGo results are way worse than Google from what I can tell so I still end up frequently going back and searching Google for things :(

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#50
post #18

Google's strategy is to profit from advertising. It fundamentally benefits from knowing as much about its users as possible. Every tactic it has will always support that strategy or it will risk failure. You can tell its strategy motivates it toward evil (its term, not mine), because its slogan is "Don't be evil." It chose that slogan because it risks being evil, in its own terms. It doesn't need a slogan like "Don't…

You are absolutely right, this is clear evidence that Google is evil.

In fact, this chain of evidence is of such brilliance and importance for mankind, you should be appointed US Attorney General.

We should once and for all end this evil and put all Google employees in prison.

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