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DuckDuckGo for Mac

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Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac

#61

Post by nerdjon »

core-utility wrote: post #58
nerdjon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is interesting is for me, I kinda take the opposite approach. Kinda ... A lot of my information has been consolidated to Apple. I am not naive enough to trust them completely. But I feel like I have made a conscious choice of balancing privacy concerns with Apple (and their business practices for the use of that data) and the convenience of features. But in my opinion one of my biggest issue I have with companie…

I could see your point there as well. If talking about Facebook and Google, I absolutely am on the same side of not giving them an inch more. I see them as data-first companies, whereas I see Apple more product-first. Whether I'm correct in that is debatable.

Agree completely, what is the worst that Apple is going to do with that data? Find out how to sell me more of their services and products?

Not sure they could sell me much more considering I already do Apple One premier (or whatever the highest tier is), Apple TV's, HomePods, AirPods, etc etc.

Maybe that is a bit of the wrong mentality, but it's a balance for me.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac

#62

Post by karaterobot »

There have been a couple DuckDuckGo initiatives recently where they force you to download their mobile app in order to get access to a product or feature on the desktop. I don't see how this is necessary, and it seems a little bit like a "growth hack", which is not the tone I want to associate with DuckDuckGo.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac

#63

Post by user3939382 »

jmull wrote: post #45
user3939382 wrote: post #14

Will the browser, like the search engine, decide which political perspectives I should be exposed to?

A search engine should rank results based on quality. Misinformation should be ranked poorly. Just because some misinformation has a political bent doesn't mean it should be exempted. Surely only the purveyors of political misinformation could disagree with this.

I don’t need other people to decide for me what’s true.

In fact I find the growing support for that frightening, given that the self-appointed arbiters of truth in corporate and social media have repeatedly, objectively been shown to be wrong, and from my personal perspective pushing a social and political agenda that is not my own.

I’m a big boy, I’ll decide for myself what counts as “misinformation” thanks very much.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac

#64

Post by nerdjon »

danShumway wrote: post #59
CollinEMac wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, fair enough. But I don't think the average user would consider this "unbiased" and "not filtered" as DDG has claimed their results are. https://reclaimthenet.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Screens...

The average user doesn't understand search engines then. It's expected that any search engine will prioritize certain results over others, because that's the entire point of a search engine, it filters and ranks sites. "Unbiased" is doing a lot of work here. I think DDG's messaging about that could have been better, and they could have better indicated what was going on when they used that language -- but to be clear…

I completely fail to understand how we are having this discussion on hacker news of all places.

If you have ever written a line of code you should understand that things have order. If search engines didn't try to organize results the result you are looking for could be on the first page or the 100th.

While I think it's fair to say that most people don't understand that google changes results based on the person. I have to imagine most people at least understand a basic concept that search results are organized in some way. Either by humans or machines (or likely both). That organization is complicated and has a number of factors in play and if done correctly should bubble up what is true.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac

#65

Post by minusf »

nerdjon wrote: post #8
rasengan wrote: post #4

DDG has been recently under attack due to tampering of search results [1]. Hope they don’t involve politics in their browser! [1] https://www.vox.com/recode/22981115/duckduckgo-free-speech-p...

Removing misinformation from Russia is a strange one to attack them for... considering the Russian invasion is about as non partisan of an issue (in the US at least) as I have seen in a long time. Regardless, search engines have to rank content somehow. We need to stop throwing around "politics" when something doesn't fit your particular narrative.

some in the US seem to disagree with you on that one... disinformation reigns far and wide.

https://nos.nl/l/2424827

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac

#66

Post by mdaniel »

verisimi wrote: post #22

Is anyone still using DDG after they stated that they will be editing results re the Ukraine war? This was a clear statement that they not letting the algorithm do the talking - they are taking a parental role and deciding what we can and cannot see. I've switched to presearch - https://engine.presearch.org/ - which I have to say I'm enjoying.

> powered by blockchain technology.

Fascinating

As best I can tell, their "decentralized" moniker is composed of "we reward you in our magic coin for searches" (and optionally for running a local node), and "the search is executed on community nodes": https://presearch.io/vision.pdf#page=33

But my mental model of running a search engine was that it is a data/bandwidth intensive operation, not CPU intensive, so I wonder how they get the index down to those workers?

I do agree that paying coin to federate out the crawling is neat, but I hope they have some kind of consensus applied to those results, too, lest one runs the risk of indexing search results mangled by any MITM (intentional or otherwise) applied to the jurisdiction of the crawling node

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac

#67

Post by jmull »

user3939382 wrote: post #63
jmull wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A search engine should rank results based on quality. Misinformation should be ranked poorly. Just because some misinformation has a political bent doesn't mean it should be exempted. Surely only the purveyors of political misinformation could disagree with this.

I don’t need other people to decide for me what’s true. In fact I find the growing support for that frightening, given that the self-appointed arbiters of truth in corporate and social media have repeatedly, objectively been shown to be wrong, and from my personal perspective pushing a social and political agenda that is not my own. I’m a big boy, I’ll decide for myself what counts as “misinformation” thanks very muc…

They aren't telling you what's true. They're just ranking search results.

And a search engine has to rank search results -- not everything can be at the top. The question isn't whether DDG should rank search results, but what criteria they should use.

I personally think the usefulness and credibility of the information are pretty good criteria, and do not think any exceptions should be made for political subjects.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac

#68

Post by gnicholas »

yegg wrote: post #41
eyelidlessness wrote: post #39

> 1. Download the DuckDuckGo mobile app (or update to the latest version) > 2. Open Settings > DuckDuckGo for Desktop (in the Privacy section). This doesn’t seem to exist? Just installed on iOS.

It's in version 7.66.2.1 (or later). We've pushed it live so it should get to you soon (if not already) if you go into the App Store.

Weirdly I had to update twice to see this option.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac

#69

Post by lilyball »

ezfe wrote: post #24
nicoburns wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad blocking support in Safari isn't great. A lot of the best extensions are a paid subscription, and the free ones seem to be noticeably worse the uBlock Origin.

Wipr is a one time fee of just a couple dollars, and it receives pretty consistent updates.

I second a vote for Wipr.

A few weeks ago something got temporarily screwed up in Safari and Wipr got disabled and I was shocked at how many ads I was suddenly seeing. I didn't realize quite how much stuff Wipr was blocking until then.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac

#70

Post by verisimi »

CitrusFruits wrote: post #56
verisimi wrote: post #22

Is anyone still using DDG after they stated that they will be editing results re the Ukraine war? This was a clear statement that they not letting the algorithm do the talking - they are taking a parental role and deciding what we can and cannot see. I've switched to presearch - https://engine.presearch.org/ - which I have to say I'm enjoying.

Search algorithms are preferential and biased by design. They are always tuned for a certain result, and usually that's with a bias towards accurate information. Obviously they've failed at this in the past, present, and future, but it should hardly be surprising that literal propaganda produced by a highly militarized government run by a tyrant is being down ranked.

Undoubtedly there is bias in the design of any software. But, you'd hope that software designers would try to keep their own biases out of it!

This is not what DDG are doing though. They are explicitly inserting their bias - no doubt this is in good cause - but I don't want any overt bias at all! I want to see the data as is. As a grown-up, I'll mediate my own searches - thanks! I don't need a parental filter!

That they were even able to implement some sort explicit bias functionality so quickly is also a concern to me. They must have had a means to manually add certain keywords etc to some sort of banned or weighted listing.

So there is some reason to think their censorship was by design.... why? Perhaps this is on request of a three letter agency, via some secret court judgement? Are there other explicit biases that they are not telling us about? How can we know?

We can't know, but do know that they are not operating in good faith - that they are editing results.

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