Don't get me wrong, I love his work, but I don't really understand why what he has to say about tech is any more relevant than any other celebrity. It's not like he has some deeper insider knowledge of the subject.
He’s a smart, successful person who has spent some time thinking about it. It’s as useful as anyone else’s opinion. People who are ‘experts’ in these areas also tend to have biases. Nobody that works for any of those companies is going to give you a straight answer.
You don't have to work for one of those companies to be an expect on tech, business and capitalism. But I expect some expertise in those subject to be able to properly evaluate the impact of these company.
The point is, there's a lot of misinformation trying to sway people to one side or the other, and unless you are someone who has spent a lot of time researching the subject, I'll assume you are just parroting some headline that told you "X is bad".
I switched my iPhone to Duck Duck Go over the last few days simply because I hate hate HATE getting linked to Reddit AMP pages from Google. Reddit (and Stack Exchange) pages are what I use most to find honest discussions about some topic. Very convenient to use those results to filter through the blogspam. Reddit's AMP pages are especially bad, with multiple annoying pop-ups that don't get cookied when you dismiss th…
here is the 2016 announcement for Reddit using AMP:
Google appears to be doing increasingly creepy stuff in pursuit of higher revenues.
For instance, I've recently noticed videos being recommended on my Android TV which are particularly related to, or the exactly the same as, those I watched recently on my computer (all done in private mode, no Google login anywhere). This has happened twice after resetting everything. It therefore appears that, contrary to their statements on tracking IP addresses, they're infact using them for recommendations and tracking. We can only imagine what else they are collecting behind the facade of SVs slef-conceited "liberalism".
I switched my iPhone to Duck Duck Go over the last few days simply because I hate hate HATE getting linked to Reddit AMP pages from Google. Reddit (and Stack Exchange) pages are what I use most to find honest discussions about some topic. Very convenient to use those results to filter through the blogspam. Reddit's AMP pages are especially bad, with multiple annoying pop-ups that don't get cookied when you dismiss th…
I’ve never been to an AMP page where I haven’t clicked forward to the actual site because the AMP sucks. Which means that Google’s attempt to, well I don’t really know what the hell they are doing with AMP pages, has made searching such a damn hassle.
The idea about private browsing is silly to me frankly. Sure DuckDuckGo can be more "private" than Google on its face, but unless they are incorporated deep in Switzerland and dev/null all traffic from a US-based IPs, they are obligated, by laws, to record-keeping and in general KYC even if its only mere "search quote" and "IP address". Otherwise the would quickly get shut down by authorities (DHS in this example) un…
Citation that KYC dictates that a Swiss company record US IPs and what the punishment is for not?
I have mixed feelings about this. If you recommend DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia you're essentially recommending Bing. Each of them have to show bing ads, forward the users' IPs as per Bing's terms of service (to fight ad fraud etc). Similarly, if you recommend StartPage, you're recommending Google. Same drill with ads. I like DuckDuckGo. But unless they build their own search - I think the fundamental problem has not be…
Yes, you're basically right...but the problem isn't building your own search engine, it's in getting search ads privately as well as just being transparent and honest about how your service works -- none of which is true for DuckDuckGo sadly. Their business model is built on sending your personal data to bing when you click on ads on their search results page which link to Bing (moreover they say they never send your IP or personal information to a third-party, but presenting an ad on your search results without disclosing that the ad links to Bing may not "legally" violate that clause but it does in spirit). Ads are also localized so even if they aren't sending your IP address (which according to Bing they are supposed to be doing, but in their terms they claim not to), they're sending your location data. DuckDuckGo further refuses to clarify what data they do send (i.e. how accurate the location data is, what is it even) to retrieve search ads. They aren't transparent about how they work and their business model is fundamentally built on non-private search ads from Bing. It's not "true privacy" nor sincere to say you're not saving any user-related data when you're sending a lot of it to firms like Bing who do save it. The only search engines close to being truly private are epicsearch.in (part of the Epic Privacy Browser) and maybe some small, interesting efforts like private.sh, neither of which have search ads.
Respectfully, I think you are definitely overestimating the cost of building a search engine. Do you have experience in search specifically? Asking in good faith here. I think you're absolutely right that it's not trivial , but it isn't a completely unsolvable problem only addressable by the major spyware corporations like Facebook, Google, etc. I think you could build a decent search engine in about 6-18 months if a…
Wouldn't there be a ton of search startups if it were actually this easy?
It's not so much the difficulty, though yes it is hard, but it's generally extremely difficult to raise capital as a late entrant into an established industry. Unless there's something disruptive. That said, it doesn't take that much capital to build a new search engine with today's computing infrastructure so a few have tried over the past 5-10 years but none were as good as Google (a minimal benchmark). They found a lot of initial interest then died out quickly (sorry I'm forgetting the names, maybe Powerset, Blekko and another). Without doing any "heavy lifting" and also thus not requiring much capital, these so-called "private" search engines have gotten some traction.
I have mixed feelings about this. If you recommend DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia you're essentially recommending Bing. Each of them have to show bing ads, forward the users' IPs as per Bing's terms of service (to fight ad fraud etc). Similarly, if you recommend StartPage, you're recommending Google. Same drill with ads. I like DuckDuckGo. But unless they build their own search - I think the fundamental problem has not be…
> I like DuckDuckGo. But unless they build their own search - I think the fundamental problem has not been tackled. There is no good, independent, private search alternative. There isn't going to be, because it's really hard and expensive to do that. I don't see how any startup could even begin to compete with their own search engine. The barrier to entry is extremely high: Bing probably would not have survived long…
It would be quite easy to only index Reddit and StackOverflow.