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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

#121

Post by throwaway10001 »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #106
JimJames wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC it depends how the ads are routed. The ads could be piped through duckduckgo so Bing only receives searches to return contextual ads for but has no knowledge of the IPs for each search. Duckduckgo then embeds the ads in the search page and returns it to the searcher, then forgets their IP. On the other hand if there's just a bit of javascript on the search page that says "Tell bing to put ads on this page using…

In the past I believe I've seen search ad links on DDG that included my IP address in the URL.

Nice, unsupported low blow to a competitor. Keep looking maybe you'll "find" some with your credit card info and home address.

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#122

Post by mtgx »

zhemao wrote: post #108
mtgx wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but what's the end point? What's the "evil" destination for Google? When do we know Google has arrived there, if you say reaching that point is inevitable? I think that even if Google themselves never do anything "evil", by any definition, there still remains this problem of "having very important user data" that you don't want to fall "in the wrong hands". The more data it has about the users, the more other,…

Google does encrypt user data at rest. The problem is that they also have the decryption keys. They need to be able to see the data in plain text in order to target ads and improve their services. That's their entire business models. So, there is pretty much zero chance that Google will ever "implement some real encryption and decentralization in its services." If we want a Search Engine/Email Provider/Video Sharing…

There are apps where they don't need to do that, such as Hangouts/Gtalk, and possibly even Drive.

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#123

Post by flaktrak »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #103
gyardley wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's also worth noting that Paul Buchheit worked at Intel before Google: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Buchheit and I remember him railing about big companies and the sort of sclerotic bureaucracy that prevailed at big companies. I think Paul also wanted to pick an idea that would prevent Google from becoming a typical big company. But I don't recall there ever being any sort of "Google's strategy leans it toward…

Now it appears Google is one of those almost all companies.

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#124

Post by crazedpsyc »

bad_user wrote: post #118
HSO wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a 0-1 thing, there are degrees of attraction towards "evil". The guard in a concentration camp has more tendency towards evil than the guard in, say, a factory or residential building. As Buchheit[1] himself said: "It’s also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent." (emphasis mine) Realizing…

Limiting technology usage because of fear of unforeseen consequences seems a little short-sighted to me. If I would agree with such a line of thought, I would be Amish or something. In regards to evilness potential, the genie is out of the bottle ever since the Internet happened. Btw, Google does personalize searches in a useful way. You may not have noticed it, especially if you're from the US. DuckDuckGo is unusabl…

1. Region can be changed in DuckDuckGo's settings, for more localized results -- by default it is set to "No region," so there is nothing localized in the results.

2. Bing is one of very very many sources, which are all remixed and combined, so the end result is completely different from Bing or any other upstream source (and most often, far better).

3. No, no, no. Nothing at all is sent to bing other than a plain request for an ad coming from DuckDuckGo servers with the query (for a page-relevant ad). So, this sentence: "user agent (which I can assure you, it does get sent to Bing)" Now, when you click on an ad, naturally your information is sent to both bing and whatever site the ad was for. That's to be expected, you are leaving DuckDuckGo at that point. This is also true when you click standard result links, of course.

Now that that's out of the way, my personal opinion of result tailoring/bubbling is: it's good sometimes. I love being in my cozy little bubble when searching for coding things, and even local businesses and such. I do NOT love bubbling when I am doing academic research. Why would I want to see content I already know and like? That invalidates the point of research, and even gives me a false idea about whatever I am researching.

Bubbling and tracking, while good in some cases, should be optional in my opinion.

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#125

Post by crazedpsyc »

clicks wrote: post #8
jacobparker wrote: post #2

They run a tor exit enclave which is really, really, cool; there is a blog post about it here: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/08/duckduckgo-now-o... One motivation for switching: they have lots of "gadgets" like Google, and will take suggestions and/or apparently let you develop new ones. Here is a cool example: https://duckduckgo.com/goodies#Programming/crontab_0_0______... Another useful feature: https://…

That is pretty awesome. I'm curious: was the privacy focus by the DDG guys always there, or was it pushed after they found it was a nice advertising point? Either way, I think this is a good enough reason for me to finally make the switch.

In the very beginning, Gabriel was more focused on the instant answers and hadn't thought much of privacy -- users brought it up after he launched it on HN.

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#126

Post by crazedpsyc »

dnda wrote: post #64
m-r-a-m wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"DuckDuckGo gets its results from over one hundred sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, which are stored in our own index), Yahoo! (through BOSS), WolframAlpha, Bing, and Yandex." [1] [1] http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...

For some reason they never say what percentage of (unique)queries are answered by which source though...

Because it varies widely :). It is entirely based on your query -- whichever source is detected as best for that type of query (i.e. Yandex is better at handling symbols, Bing's advanced syntax is better [mostly]), and of course it changes over time as rules are tweaked and added.

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#128

Post by zhemao »

mtgx wrote: post #122
zhemao wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google does encrypt user data at rest. The problem is that they also have the decryption keys. They need to be able to see the data in plain text in order to target ads and improve their services. That's their entire business models. So, there is pretty much zero chance that Google will ever "implement some real encryption and decentralization in its services." If we want a Search Engine/Email Provider/Video Sharing…

There are apps where they don't need to do that, such as Hangouts/Gtalk, and possibly even Drive.

Then they would need a way to do client-side public key encryption in the web browser, which is difficult and not really an important feature as far as the vast majority of their users are concerned.
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