431–440 of 496 posts
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It's independently profitable, though.
Because it's basically a reskin of Bing search. They say they index a handful of "sources" which are just individual websites, and also redundant because Bing also indexes them.
I wish they were explaining why they moved away from Mapbox and OSM in general!
>I wish they were explaining why they moved away from Mapbox and OSM in general! Because it sucks. Isn’t that obvious? There’s no point in having a feature that nobody uses. I switched to DDG a few months ago and this has always been the one weakness. This is really good news IMO. Apple maps has come a long long way since launch, and their data is about on par with Google at this point. You can argue all day that of…
In California maybe.
Everywhere else? Not even close.
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Yes, certainly. DDG very often have quite okay results while Google has almost always outstanding results. I have to use !g quite often when searching for a programming or architecture solutions that are just slightly more complex than mainstream. I am using DDG mostly because I trust in the cause. OK, I admit that bangs are nice. That being said, both our comments are just an opinions. I'd gladly see a research abou…
Remember that "Bing it on" campaign Microsoft ran, to show that in a blind test, users couldn't tell the difference between Bing search results and Google search results? Well, Microsoft's test completely backfired on me. I ran the test many times. In most cases, one of the columns had clearly better results, and 80+% of the time, that column was Google. Small sample size to be sure, but it covers 100% of the populat…
And I also pretty much never have to use !g. DDG results are sufficient most of the time, and when they are not, I notice Google usually also fails to provide satisfactory results.
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Apple’s main business is hardware, and software that helps sell the hardware. Any revenue from data is likely a seperate, minor stream; and for it to become a significant one, likely requires significant changes in Apple’s operations. Like any other hardware company, they don’t need google’s kind of data collection to make money. But DDG is primarily funded by search, and the search business is funded by ads, which a…
Maybe we should start thinking about growth. All kind of bad decisions are taken in the name of growth. Maybe some companies could just provide a service, be profitable and grow just to a natural size not focusing on growth itself. That would require a new way of thinking the role of companies in human society.
Is there any point in talking about DDG "privacy" as long as they use yandex (which is basically an fsb (kgb) outlet) as a search backend?
I'd expect DDG to not send my IP address or browser info to yandex. Is that not the case?
I wish they were explaining why they moved away from Mapbox and OSM in general!
Implementation of OSM stuff is horrible and usability as well. I LOVE free software and my privacy is very important to me - so I switched everything to self-hosted and encrypted solutions. Except maps. I still use google maps for a lot of navigating just because other solutions are really inconvenient to work with.
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Apple has more than enough money. More than they'll ever need. It's actively employing strategies to avoid taxes. I think they can afford to do some public service from time to time, even if it means (in absolute numbers, massive) losses (if you don't count the value of having done something good for the people). I'm not saying Apple does nothing for the open source scene. In fact, they're maintaining some important…
Apple do support OSM. In one European country, Apple Maps actually uses OSM data solely.
I wish they were explaining why they moved away from Mapbox and OSM in general!
Living in Germany, I've found that OSM embeds in websites are more common for me now while browsing, and to be blunt: they're ugly. The maps themselves are just difficult to visually parse, and unpleasant to look at compared to Google Maps and Apple Maps (which look comparably attractive at a glance). I dunno if that's solvable using a third party OSM service provider or not, but to me it seems like a good enough rea…
I have to say I'm pretty upset about this. Not over privacy stuff (I don't trust Apple that much either), but because Apple maps just sucks. Unless things changed within the last 4 months, Apple Maps couldn't accurately navigate me from Custer State Park to Mt. Rushmore (which really isn't far).
Have you previously used OpenStreetMap? I'd be interested in hearing from those who have. I can say as a DDG user that presentation-wise I disliked what DDG was using before -- but from a direction-accuracy perspective I simply have no idea and would love to hear from others.
OSM is becoming pretty impressive too. Even smaller towns here in Sweden are decently mapped. A huge difference compared to just five years ago¹, far greater difference than since Apple Maps was launched as far as I can tell. Apple Maps launched in a better state, yes, but not in a good state, and I think it's been moving slowly since then. OSM launched in a minimal state but are moving forward like a maglev train.
¹ Also visualized here: https://labs.mapbox.com/ten-years-openstreetmap/