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Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

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Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#191

Post by denysvitali »

unknownaccount wrote: post #187
rpdillon wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> open-source the entire search index db and accompanying webserver software, making it easy for users to setup their own local instance of DDG which is actually auditable Easy to self-host? How large do you suppose the Bing index is, for example? Simply storing the index would be an immense undertaking beyond the reach of probably everyone who has ever self-hosted anything, ever. This ignores the compute required to…

Yet somehow search engines like Google and AskJeeves existed and worked alright 20+ years ago on hardware 1/1000th as powerful as it is today.

I think the web didn't have the same amount of websites 20 years ago...

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#192

Post by richardsocher »

danShumway wrote: post #150
MichaelCollins wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Last I checked, DDG did not also own an analytics service that has infested half the world's websites. uMatrix shows a 3rd party request to improving.duckduckgo.com every time I visit a page from DDG search results, ostensibly to measure click-through rate. This is claimed to be anonymous, but in principle it gives DDG the opportunity to log much about their users' browsing habits.

Even in the worst case scenario you propose, where DuckDuckGo is deliberately lying and collecting more information than they claim and where those clickthrough requests are sending as much information as is possible for them to send, this is still exposing you to way less risk than Google Analytics. It is still, I would claim, objectively more private to use DuckDuckGo than Google even in a world where they are lyin…

I'm gonna throw you.com (i'm a co-founder) into that mix. We've been growing a lot and have a private mode that stores nothing at all.

What audit would you suggest for us to prove that statement? It would be great to have a some independent party verify this.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#193

Post by LtWorf »

lohfu wrote: post #118
canadaduane wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only useful for people who know what a search engine is. (Seriously, many people equate "googling" = "search engine", and don't know there is a general category of this thing). Unless there are two big bold buttons on start-up--one that says "Use Google for Search" and the other that says "Use Duck Duck Go for Search"--it would appear broken to them. Even then, almost everyone would pick "Google" just for nam…

i would argue most people that install chromium, not chrome, no what a search engine is. unfortunately, since chromium lost google account login capabilities, i do not install chromium anymore. now i just think "search engine" means "google".

Installing chrome on debian is certainly harder than installing chromium.

And you are assuming there is only 1 user in the machine. Which is not the case for people who have kids.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#194

Post by tsimionescu »

unknownaccount wrote: post #187
rpdillon wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> open-source the entire search index db and accompanying webserver software, making it easy for users to setup their own local instance of DDG which is actually auditable Easy to self-host? How large do you suppose the Bing index is, for example? Simply storing the index would be an immense undertaking beyond the reach of probably everyone who has ever self-hosted anything, ever. This ignores the compute required to…

Yet somehow search engines like Google and AskJeeves existed and worked alright 20+ years ago on hardware 1/1000th as powerful as it is today.

I wouldn't be surprised if the indexed subset of Facebook alone were more than 1000x larger than all of the indexed web 20 years ago. The web in general has probably expanded many millions or hundreds of millions of times.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#195

Post by tsimionescu »

unknownaccount wrote: post #160
7v3x3n3sem9vv wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those aren't proper audits. And again, bringing up the face that it's open source is a meaningless piece of information since there is no way to verify it's the same software code on production. > The best thing you could do, if you actually care about privacy and not just $$$, is to open-source the entire search index db and accompanying webserver software, making it easy for users to setup their own local instanc…

>self hosting isn't feasible for 99% of the population Its only this way because companies have a vested interest in keeping it like that. It's how they make their money. It is absolutely within the realm of possibility that people host their own search engine. 99% of people know how to install Google Chrome right? this should be no different. The entire search engine & webserver stack it depends on could be bundled…

Sure, the problem with installing a local search engine is the installer technology. It can't be the petabyte of index information that the search engine actually needs, and the petaflops of CPU it would need to search through it.

Everyone has a PB of SSD disk space, some few TB of RAM and a few thousand CPUs to throw at the search problem, or is happy to type in a search query and give a 16 core CPU a few days to execute it, right?

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#196

Post by benplumley »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #36
bla3 wrote: post #13

DDG is for-profit and serves for the most part Bing results. Why not pick something truly open, like search.marginalia.nu?

Flattering. Unfortunately my search engine is far away, both in terms of functionality and hardware capacity from being able to deal with that. Maybe some day, who knows, but not yet. Even if I'm destined to make the Linux of search engines, we're metaphorically living in 1992 or so. Would be funny though because it's both developed on a Debian workstation and hosted on a Debian server.

Hey, totally unrelated, but the way your status page is set up made me think your site was down for months (I had started to assume permanently) - when it last went down for maintenance I got redirected to https://status.marginalia.nu/?query=... which said, and still says, "Site down for maintenance" across the top.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#197

Post by epigramx »

canadaduane wrote: post #96
jonas-w wrote: post #16

Best approach i think is, they way "ungoogled-chromium" does it. They don't enforce organization policies, but they set the default config to "no search" and then leave it up to the user to change it.

This is only useful for people who know what a search engine is. (Seriously, many people equate "googling" = "search engine", and don't know there is a general category of this thing). Unless there are two big bold buttons on start-up--one that says "Use Google for Search" and the other that says "Use Duck Duck Go for Search"--it would appear broken to them. Even then, almost everyone would pick "Google" just for nam…

Exactly. We're on the third age of the internet so to speak. At the first only the computer nerds were on it (up to ~2000); then only computer nerds + mostly young adults were on it (up to ~2010); and now all the literal toddlers and literal elderly and everyolne else is on it.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#198

Post by jamesrr39 »

unknownaccount wrote: post #189
41b696ef1113 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious, so as a point of comparison, the latest Common Crawl [0] is 3.1 billion pages and 370 TB uncompressed. I would presume that Bing would be significantly larger given commercial interests. [0]: https://commoncrawl.org/connect/blog/

If somehow Google and AskJeeves worked perfectly fine 20 years ago for millions of monthly users, I find it hard to believe a modern powerful computer lacks the resources to support a search engine for a single person.

What is the largest hard disk one can buy nowadays? I found a WD Gold 20TB. You'd need 19 of them plugged into your computer just to hold the uncompressed archive from Common Crawl.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#199

Post by yuhong »

mrweasel wrote: post #61
garciasn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the results from search.marginalia.nu are absolutely irrelevant?

It would also crash marginalia I think. Which would be sad. What would we have Debian change the default search to? I get that DuckDuckGo might not be ideal, but it is better than Google, Bing, Yahoo or Marginalia. The results need to be good enough, but also not obviously anti-privacy. It basically leave you with DuckDuckGo, Qwants or Ecosia. Personally I might had picked Ecosia, had they not had a cookie banner.

Part of the problem is that Google was designed when PCs booted from spinning rust and a fast CPU was a Pentium II.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#200

Post by josefx »

tsimionescu wrote: post #195
unknownaccount wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>self hosting isn't feasible for 99% of the population Its only this way because companies have a vested interest in keeping it like that. It's how they make their money. It is absolutely within the realm of possibility that people host their own search engine. 99% of people know how to install Google Chrome right? this should be no different. The entire search engine & webserver stack it depends on could be bundled…

Sure, the problem with installing a local search engine is the installer technology. It can't be the petabyte of index information that the search engine actually needs, and the petaflops of CPU it would need to search through it. Everyone has a PB of SSD disk space, some few TB of RAM and a few thousand CPUs to throw at the search problem, or is happy to type in a search query and give a 16 core CPU a few days to ex…

> or is happy to type in a search query and give a 16 core CPU a few days to execute it, right?

That is just a naive implementation. For the first 10 results you grab ads, the database of those is significantly smaller, for the next 20 results you look at Wikipedia and stackexchange clone sites. Everything after that is indexed using math.random(). If you want to get fancy run the query through a fact creating AI and present the results inline, people are always happy to know that the color of the sky is purple or that the ideal amount of chess players is 5. Disclaimer: I have never seen googles source code nor any patents related to it, any similarity with existing search engines is pure coincidence.

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