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Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

spreadprivacy.com

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Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#81

Post by nelaboras »

laurent92 wrote: post #75
johnchristopher wrote: post #41

Good, I decided to finally ditch Google Maps as my usual go-to app when I need bus directions, itineraries or things like that. The app is now cluttered with too much suggestions about restaurants, places and suggestions I have no interest about on the moment. I recently re-installed Here maps (which I loved on windows mobile) and my country railway app has built-in bus data so it can help plan travels as well. I did…

Google is trying to find the saturation point where people start leaving... My annoyance is that every second trip is... back home. So with their gigawatt AI, I suppose it could have learnt. So I guess it tries to do its best to avoid me going home: typing « Home » suggests « Home Depot? home improvement? Homie restaurant? Homicide drop point? » I’m joking with the last one but Google seems to be pushing too hard to…

If you have saved your address home is always the first option, no need to type anything

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#82

Post by nelaboras »

jhoechtl wrote: post #72

It is cleverly hidden that the majority of search results still comes out of Google or Bing. Of course with their blessing. It is so damn overdue to have a truly independent search engine which ranks results not based on marketing companies and paid results.

I think its only bing, not Google.

That said, both bing and ddg tend to give me similarly disappointing results. They just seem focused on the US and searching in any other country in English, or even dare to use another language the result quality and especially recency drops significantly.

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#83

Post by nelaboras »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #2

Does the misleading "spreadprivacy" domain name really do more good than harm? It's fine to market DDG as privacy respecting, but making an astroturf "privacy advice" org is disgusting.

It has the DDG logo at the top and speaks in "we" about DDG, not sure why it needs to be any more obvious.

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#84

Post by trevor-e »

karussell wrote: post #51

I'll do a shameless advertisement of our open source routing engine GraphHopper as one of our main advantage over the big companies is that we do not track users. We rent our servers (not on AWS or GC :) ) and remove logs after max. 5 weeks https://graphhopper.com/maps/ (see our privacy policy for more details) We only keep them for debugging purposes and attack prevention. The maps layer (visualization) is done from…

I just tried it out and it didn't work for any addresses I typed in for Cambridge, MA. It would only show results for Cambridge, England =[

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#85

Post by karussell »

trevor-e wrote: post #84
karussell wrote: post #51

I'll do a shameless advertisement of our open source routing engine GraphHopper as one of our main advantage over the big companies is that we do not track users. We rent our servers (not on AWS or GC :) ) and remove logs after max. 5 weeks https://graphhopper.com/maps/ (see our privacy policy for more details) We only keep them for debugging purposes and attack prevention. The maps layer (visualization) is done from…

I just tried it out and it didn't work for any addresses I typed in for Cambridge, MA. It would only show results for Cambridge, England =[

Sorry to hear this. You can still right click the map and create routes if you like to try the routing feature. And to improve the geocoding: we support the work behind it: https://twitter.com/graphhopper/status/1263033938584502272

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#86

Post by movedx »

rwmj wrote: post #23

After getting thoroughly sick of the full page "pop up" that Google Search and Youtube both now display on just about every visit, I switched to DDG for search and youtube-dl for YT and it's actually been great. DDG results are fine, and the !bang (!g, !w etc) makes it really easy to jump to other search engines / places if I really need it. Google have lost me as a regular customer for good.

> youtube-dl for YT and it's actually been great

I was interested in doing this too. One issue I found, however, was getting a list of my subscriptions without having to go to the website and fetch the channel IDs or video IDs for youtube-dl to then use.

I also noted that youtube-dl can download from your subscriptions list directly, which is cool. I was going to put that on a cronjob and just let it milk my subscriptions on a daily basis as new videos come out.

I've also been using "Clean Up YouTube", a Firefox plugin, which basically eliminates whatever you want from the UI. For me that's the home screen/trending crap, comments and just about everything. Now I only focus on my subscription feed and move on from YouTube after that. This has helped to drastically reduce the amount of crap I watch.

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#87

Post by x32n23nr »

amelius wrote: post #34

With 70 million daily searches (source wikipedia), the company must be doing great. I wonder why Mozilla doesn't explore this market.

At some point they did flirt with the idea, even invested in a search company, but then they changed their mind [0]

[0] https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-11/the-pivot-that-excited-...

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#88

Post by nbadg »

politelemon wrote: post #42
lucb1e wrote: post #3

The article doesn't say, but if it used an OpenStreetMap-based routing engine (which you can self-host because, y'know, open data) then the directions might misalign to the display layer which is Apple Maps. Therefore it must send your directions request to Apple. Which I guess is fine, they'll just see "some DDG user" requesting certain directions and it's definitely not the worst company they could be working with,…

It's the one thing that's kept me off DDG - the superior choice of OSM exists. And as you've pointed out, their choice of maps now forces the user into Apple's hands as the choice of navigation, a company which I do not trust, and I certainly don't see it as the least evil. Even placing my mistrust aside, it's once again a US-centric move; as garbage as Apple Maps is, it's even worse outside the US. The only reason f…

Speaking from experience, trying to deploy a production-grade OSM instance is an enormous amount of work. Several businesses have been built purely around that (Maptiler and Mapbox, to name two off the top of my head). I agree that, particularly outside the US, OSM may seem theoretically to be a better choice, but I'm more inclined to assume that DDG simply decided the development resources needed for OSM were too great to justify it, and went with the alternative that they think gives them the best shot at both improving user privacy and competing with google.

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#89

Post by radicalriddler »

I haven't enabled DuckDuckGo to use my location, so when I go to directions, it assumes my location is in a city near me, which I assume is based on my IP address.

What's the benefit of doing this, rather than just leaving it blank?

PS: Product looks really good. Really quick on Firefox, without any dumb animations like Google Maps that make it seem so much slower.

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#90

Post by fbelzile »

karussell wrote: post #60
kqr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For bicycle, in my case. Sorry, should have specified. Bicycle infrastructure is awful where I live so I need to spend a lot of cognitive effort just not being killed by the road. In that mental state I can't follow very complicated directions, so I prefer bigger roads!

Bike routes are currently heavily optimized already and sometimes I'm also a bit surprised about the good route quality ;) but actually this is only possible with the fantastic OpenStreetmap data. Still the most improvements are probably possible via data improvements in many areas. Still we will try to improve routes via "less turns" and more precise elevation data etc. For bike routing we only need to keep the bala…

I just tested some bike routes for my city. I agree, well done. ;)

Being able to export to gpx is also very cool.

I feel like "best" biking routes are very subjective, so I'm sure you can't cater everyone, perfectly.

A cool feature I'd love: the ability to Google Street view right from the non-Google Maps service. Would that be allowed?

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