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Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

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Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#131

Post by logn »

schoen wrote: post #43
yegg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specific examples you're willing to share really help us improve. Feel free to send them to us at inbound at duckduckgo.

I found DDG commonly does worse than Google on long natural-language questions, especially ones that are mainly made up of common words, and also seems to have more trouble than Google with automatically splitting queries into relevant noun phrases (like if a query included "vegetarian restaurant new york", I expect Google more reliably to decompose that into (vegetarian restaurant) (new york) than DDG). But I'll kee…

Or something like "movie with andre the giant". Google gets Princess Bride as result #2. DDG doesn't have a direct link to that in the first batch. I think Google handles ambiguity better (what users are searching for when they don't know how to express it). Of course, Google tends to overdo this too such that simple keyword searches ain't what they used to be.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#132

Post by sroerick »

fpgaminer wrote: post #101
justcommenting wrote: post #2

I've also noticed the quality of DuckDuckGo search results has been steadily improving, especially over the past year. I would encourage anyone who tried it and went back to another search engine to consider giving DuckDuckGo another shot--you may be pleasantly surprised!

I've had this question for awhile ... What is the advantage to using DuckDuckGo, with respect to privacy? All I've found is that they say privacy is important and that they don't track users. But I see no way for them to prove that. So you still have to trust them not to spy on you. Perhaps on the whole that is better than alternatives. "Google is definitely spying on me" versus "DuckDuckGo might be spying on me". Is…

It's worth supporting companies who are using a privacy-centric business model.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#133

Post by sroerick »

antr wrote: post #8
justcommenting wrote: post #2

I've also noticed the quality of DuckDuckGo search results has been steadily improving, especially over the past year. I would encourage anyone who tried it and went back to another search engine to consider giving DuckDuckGo another shot--you may be pleasantly surprised!

I just read Gabriel's post, and I pretty much agree (and do) with what he says. Due to these shared believes I've been using DDG quite a bit, I even deleted the Google search app from my phone, and instead been using DDG's iOS app as my default mobile search engine. However, every time I use DDG it hurts a bit. The quality of the results are very far behind from that of Google's. I many times end up doing a Google se…

I find the "!g" to perform an anonymous Google search works great, and has very little added effort.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#134

Post by sroerick »

rom16384 wrote: post #47
yegg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specific examples you're willing to share really help us improve. Feel free to send them to us at inbound at duckduckgo.

I find the auto-correct to be over-zealous. If DDG decides that what I've entered is a typo, It will only show me results for the "corrected" word, so I'll have to quote uncommonly searched words. This usually happens when the search is similar to another one that is much more common.

I agree with this criticism. Making auto-correct optional would help usability a lot.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#135

Post by schoen »

logn wrote: post #131
schoen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found DDG commonly does worse than Google on long natural-language questions, especially ones that are mainly made up of common words, and also seems to have more trouble than Google with automatically splitting queries into relevant noun phrases (like if a query included "vegetarian restaurant new york", I expect Google more reliably to decompose that into (vegetarian restaurant) (new york) than DDG). But I'll kee…

Or something like "movie with andre the giant". Google gets Princess Bride as result #2. DDG doesn't have a direct link to that in the first batch. I think Google handles ambiguity better (what users are searching for when they don't know how to express it). Of course, Google tends to overdo this too such that simple keyword searches ain't what they used to be.

Google also apparently entirely eliminated the verbatim search mode (some time after making double quotes no longer perform a verbatim search). People now complain that there is no documented way to perform verbatim searches with Google.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#136

Post by stavrianos »

warfangle wrote: post #120
fpgaminer wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had this question for awhile ... What is the advantage to using DuckDuckGo, with respect to privacy? All I've found is that they say privacy is important and that they don't track users. But I see no way for them to prove that. So you still have to trust them not to spy on you. Perhaps on the whole that is better than alternatives. "Google is definitely spying on me" versus "DuckDuckGo might be spying on me". Is…

Just did a surface audit. They set and read no cookies. You can test this yourself. They set etags on static assets, and those theoretically could be used to track you as an identifiable visitor. How else would they track you? By IP address? That would make any kind of tracking useless -- how would you deal with trying to track 100,000 connections from behind NAT, individually, other than cookies or etags? There's br…

What evidence of browser fingerprinting would you expect to see?

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#139

Post by rocky1138 »

falcolas wrote: post #36
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #18

And there are indeed a few solutions that actually grant you partial relief from the pains of online tracking. First, switch your search engine, email and other major services where your personal information is heavily tracked to good private alternatives. Second, add EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere plugin to your browser, which will encrypt web site connections where possible. Third, add EFF’s Privacy Badger plugin to your b…

I have personally found that a hosts file can reduce the need for a bunch of those addons - it can block not only ads, but also many forms of tracking. I've found it very refreshing when surfing the web. For reference, I use: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

Does having thousands of lines in your hosts file degrade browser performance due to increased length of lookups?

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#140

Post by rocky1138 »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #71

I'm curious how DuckDuckGo makes money. They don't charge us for search results, and they don't use our information to target ads. How do they make money to run their operations?

I've seen ads on their site related to keywords in my search query.
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