Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

fastcolabs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 245 posts

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#31

Post by [deleted] »

tosseraccount wrote: post #21
mscarborough wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we stop with this "bill gates is watching your searches" nonsense? I know you're fascinating, but Brin and Gates may be concerned about many things not related your internet activity. Corporations in data monitoring projects, OK.

I do not enjoy the "targeted" advertising. If I visit finance.yahoo.com, I'm okay with an advertisement that appears from the same IP address for a brokerage. I am not okay with the 500 advertising companies contacting each other (and slowing down the internet) to track me. Sorry, it sucks.

[deleted]

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#32

Post by grey-area »

antr wrote: post #23
hdevalence wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that one can be concerned about privacy enough to choose to use a service which does not log queries, without thinking that this choice makes them immune to surveillance by state actors.

I agree, but that seems not to be the NSA's concern when going over the Snowden files http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/30/nsa_smile...

They can only keep that sort of deep data for so long due to storage requirements - I think in the uk at present it is 30 days. If your chosen search provider keeps a handy list of your searches forever associated with your account though, it makes life much easier for agencies to access it at any point in the future and replay your life. For someone with mail at gmail and web history on, that anyone would have that much data stored on you is a scary prospect.

There are other much better reasons not to prefer google as your search company though, foremost among them that they sell advertising and are no longer in the growth stage but the monopoly stage of the corporate lifecycle, so their incentives are not really aligned with free search customers. Their dominance of web search is starting to seriously distort the web.

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#33

Post by jmsduran »

tosseraccount wrote: post #11

Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. The !g and !b commands make it my first choice. If the results aren't getting what you want, try the search on google or bing. IF you don't mind Sergy Brin or Bill Gates tracking you. I still think there's room for a search engine that supports boolean(ish?) operations like AND, OR , NOT and NEAR. Providing links directly to the source and not a redirect to th…

I applaud what DDG is doing. I've been using it as my default search engine for roughly 2 years. Yes, there are some areas for improvement, especially when it comes to complex technical queries. But for the majority of everyday things, DDG is excellent, and returns less advertisement bloat within its results than Google/Bing.

Plus ducks are my favorite animal, so launching DDG as I begin the work day is a joy!

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#34

Post by mihok »

I switched over to DuckDuckGo as my default search provider, for about half a year. It was alright for a while... but eventually I would search for things on both DDG and Google and realized how much I was missing... Sadly I've moved back to Google since then.

Another issue that kept coming up for me, was their lack of keyboard controls on search result pages. Although, this isn't really as relevant to most users I would speculate

Re: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

#39

Post by bsbechtel »

I reached out to Gabriel a few times while living in the Southeast PA region for entrepreneurial related questions. He always got back to me within a day or so...incredibly helpful and nice. I switched to DDG a while back, and while it took a little bit to get used to the changes, I use it for 80% of my searches now. The only way they will improve is by us using them more and more often. You can complain about how they aren't as good as Google, but that doesn't help them improve. Getting involved in the DDG community and setting them as your main search engine does.
Post reply on HN