Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)

#151

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 8:45 AM UTC

jolmg wrote: post #148

3xblah wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is another perspective from a non-developer user on those reasons and the resulting tradeoff (of allowing DDG to trivially track which result links are followed): 1. Privacy conscious users can control whether a Referer header is sent and if so, the content of that header. They might choose to use a browser that does not make it easy to control the Referer header. But DDG does not account for those privacy consc…

> But DDG does not account for those privacy conscious users who may be using browsers that do allow this control. (Bias discosure: I use one and not for privacy reasons.) > The DDG decision seems to encourage users to choose browsers that have privacy-unfriendly default settings or that do not make it easy or even possible to control what if any Referer is sent. I can't follow your logic. That DDG provides their own…

[deleted]

Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)

#152

Post by cygned » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 9:05 AM UTC

I switched to DDG for two reasons:

- Privacy

- It doesn't try to be smarter than me

More often when I use Google to search (e.g. for research), it decides to ignore one or multiple words, yielding irrelevant results. It's fixable, I can quote them, it even offers to do that, but it drives me nuts.

Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)

#153

Post by 3xblah » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 9:06 AM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #139

3xblah wrote: post #120

If the user submits a GET request to DDG from the commandline with Javascript disabled, then all results links are prefixed with the address of a DDG server, e.g., https://example.com becomes https://duckduckgo.com/l/uddg=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com Whatever the reasons may be for this decision, it allows DDG to track all links that the user follows from the results page. That is no better than Google. It is not a priv…

Try adding &kd=-1 to the end of your search URL. For example: https://duckduckgo.com/lite/?q=test&kd=-1

Thank you! Problem solved.

Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)

#154

Post by shafyy » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 9:20 AM UTC

vanadium wrote: post #31

pixxel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

!g search term

!s = Startpage, anonymizing by proxy the Google SERPs. I know, I'm having to retrain my DDG Bang muscle memory myself.

Why not just go directly on Startpage instead of DDG -> Startpage?

Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)

#155

Post by Vinnl » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 9:21 AM UTC

scoutt wrote: post #150

I'm glad they're moving forward, but I still don't buy it. Someone is tossing a big load of money on them (you know that when you see their ad in twitter every day, and articles like this), specially in the last year. When that happens, investors will want their return, no matter what. People saying they respect your privacy, but... how do you really know? Also because "improved privacy" != "no targeted ads". They ca…

> how do you really know?

You don't really know. However, when your entire USP is being privacy-friendly (and really, that's the primary feature that Google can't copy), it would be incredibly damaging if word got out that that wasn't true. And we can be reasonably certain that, if it wasn't true, word would get out.

Also note that DDG explicitly says they don't do user tracking. So while ads are targeted in the sense that you'll see ads relevant to the search term you're using (and your location and other data attached to the query), they're not keeping a profile of you and targeting ads based on that. In other words: there should be no significant user data for them to hand over.

I'm not sure why they would have to become the number 2 search engine at some point, although regular search engine manipulation does already seem to affect them sometimes. I don't see why they would have to track users to combat that.

Sure, open source would be nice. But right now, we do have reason to assume that they're at least significantly better than Google, without having to sacrifice a lot in search result quality.

Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)

#156

Post by anonytrary » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 9:22 AM UTC

I'm not trying to defend Google by any means, but I've always wondered how DDG can be as profitable as Google if they take into account less information when showing you ads. Surely using more information allows you to more efficiently match supply with potential demand, which is the point of ads. Is there any research out there that shows that this efficiency gap does not exist?

I don't use or follow Facebook that much, but every time I hear Mark Zuckerberg defending Facebook's business model, he always says something like "we want to make sure the ads you see are actually useful/relevant to you". Is there a way to achieve this outcome without taking into account more personal information?

Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)

#157

Post by agumonkey » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 9:23 AM UTC

rlue wrote: post #125

3xblah wrote: post #120

If the user submits a GET request to DDG from the commandline with Javascript disabled, then all results links are prefixed with the address of a DDG server, e.g., https://example.com becomes https://duckduckgo.com/l/uddg=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com Whatever the reasons may be for this decision, it allows DDG to track all links that the user follows from the results page. That is no better than Google. It is not a priv…

Here it is with piping so you don't have to litter your working directory: curl -s https://duckduckgo.com/lite/?q=example.com | grep -m1 "'result-link'" curl -sd "q=example.com" https://duckduckgo.com/lite/ | grep -m1 "'result-link'"

And for xpath lovers

    curl -sd "q=example.com" https://duckduckgo.com/lite/ | xmllint -html -xpath '//a[@class = "result-link"]/@href' - 
    curl -s https://duckduckgo.com/lite/?q=example.com | xmllint -html -xpath '//a[@class = "result-link"]/@href' -

Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)

#158

Post by agumonkey » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 9:24 AM UTC

ddg is nice for the bangs (although sometimes they drop some) and for very simple queries

for the rest you're only one !g away from the usual

Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)

#159

Post by Tomte » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 9:25 AM UTC

pixelbreaker wrote: post #12

I first tried DDG in its early years and it just didn't yield the results I needed, I tried it again a couple of years ago and have stuck with it ever since as it has must better results these days.

I rarely get useful results from Duckduckgo, so !g is my usual first attempt, not a secondary thing after trying DDG's results.

For example, just now, I came across "ED survivor". No idea what "ED" means here (it's eating disorder).

I just put it into DDG and got nothing on the first page that looked like it could be pertinent: A user name "ED survivor" on Instagram posting about vegetarianism, Ed Stafford on Wikipedia, "ED: The Survivor" (a mod for a computer game evidently), Devil Survivor Full HD (a film obviously, no idea what ED means here), a few more in this vein, until the page ends with the TV series Survivor on Wikipedia.

Google: First hit "Template:ED survivor" in Wikipedia (and that page contains the words "eating disorder". Second hit "Eating Disorder Survivors Wall", third hit "Surviving ED" from HealthyPlace (so it's health-related – and the snippet shown on the result page starts with "Eating Disorders recovery is a long road.).

The rest of the results on Google are all similar, all of them(!) clearly tell me what ED means in this context.

DDG gave me crap, none of the results(!) came even close to answering my question.

This is not a singular occurence, just a thing I wanted to know a few minutes ago. I'd love to take DDG's search results, but when not narrowed down to specific origins with bang commands, the results are usually worthless.

Edit: and before people tell me that I should have used quotation marks around my search terms, great, let's try that: Two results with "We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.". From the top three results, one times out, one redirects to a sports betting site, and one to a product in an online apothecary (nothing to do with eating disorder). Then penis extension. Erectile dysfunction, something general about mental disorder, and again two results about penis enlargement.

Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)

#160

Post by scoutt » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 10:15 AM UTC

Vinnl wrote: post #155

scoutt wrote: post #150

I'm glad they're moving forward, but I still don't buy it. Someone is tossing a big load of money on them (you know that when you see their ad in twitter every day, and articles like this), specially in the last year. When that happens, investors will want their return, no matter what. People saying they respect your privacy, but... how do you really know? Also because "improved privacy" != "no targeted ads". They ca…

> how do you really know? You don't really know. However, when your entire USP is being privacy-friendly (and really, that's the primary feature that Google can't copy), it would be incredibly damaging if word got out that that wasn't true. And we can be reasonably certain that, if it wasn't true, word would get out. Also note that DDG explicitly says they don't do user tracking. So while ads are targeted in the sens…

> we do have reason to assume

> word would get out

> no significant user data

These, as you say, are assumptions. That's why I don't (still) buy it.

They are in "sell" mode right now. They would say anything to gain traction, and it's working. That's why they are pushing hard and investing a lot. Remember it's about making BIG money through an advertisement-based business, what could possibly go wrong?

Imagine that you are magically handled the DB for the searches done today. What would you can possible learn from that information? Perhaps you can't track what searches did HN user Vinnl, but the info has surely a value. They may not be honest about what are they doing with that information.