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Care about search privacy? Duck Duck Go no longer logs IPs.

gabrielweinberg.com

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Re: Care about search privacy? Duck Duck Go no longer logs IPs.

#91

Post by froo »

jacquesm wrote: post #86
webwright wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? What can the consequences be? I'm not being flip-- I think it's easy to say that but its harder to pin down dangerous scenarios. The increasing fact is that the more Google knows about you, the better they can serve up search results (and ads, of course). I think most users would NOT opt-out given the chance to do so (if it meant harming their search quality). Related quote from Matt Cutts' blog: "It’s a long…

Let me give you just two possible scenarios, there are plenty more: - An insurance company somehow gets their hands on search data and finds a way to associate that with their customers, figures out who is probably about to apply for coverage for a bunch of expensive treatments and cancels their insurance before they can make the claim for some trumped up reason. - A political party gets their hands on this informati…

>An insurance company somehow gets their hands on search data and finds a way to associate that with their customers

You mean like the AOL search data leak? I never read anything about insurance companies misappropriating the data in this manner. So I'd say its more of a long shot.

Same with political parties... again, never read anything like that.

Not to say that it hasn't happened, I'd be curious if anyone has any information to show if it has?

Re: Care about search privacy? Duck Duck Go no longer logs IPs.

#92

Post by lena »

devinj wrote: post #49

It seems sort of like you're destroying the possibility for growth with this, though. From what I understand of Google's work, they really have improved tremendously from analyzing data (to find how searches go wrong), and from using the data in new features (such as with spell checking, adding new terms into the query, personalizing searches, etc.). And I mean, I value privacy. I do. But, I value the quality of the…

In my opinion Google results used to be great before they did all the personalizing, and now they are often really bad. I get infuriated sometimes how hard it is to search for a specific term. I have to use all kinds of + and - signs in my search terms to get anything near a meaningful result and it is not straightforward at all to simply go to an English version of a Google site because Google insists that I must be Dutch and therefore only want localized information.

Of course they did not get worse because of the personalizing (though the location-based stuff absolutely has to go away - we have browser language strings for that, don't try to guess what I want if I have a way to tell you what I want), but I do think they did pretty well before they did all that, so I see no reason why DuckDuckGo can't as well and wish them the best.

Re: Care about search privacy? Duck Duck Go no longer logs IPs.

#93

Post by lionhearted »

lena wrote: post #92
devinj wrote: post #49

It seems sort of like you're destroying the possibility for growth with this, though. From what I understand of Google's work, they really have improved tremendously from analyzing data (to find how searches go wrong), and from using the data in new features (such as with spell checking, adding new terms into the query, personalizing searches, etc.). And I mean, I value privacy. I do. But, I value the quality of the…

In my opinion Google results used to be great before they did all the personalizing, and now they are often really bad. I get infuriated sometimes how hard it is to search for a specific term. I have to use all kinds of + and - signs in my search terms to get anything near a meaningful result and it is not straightforward at all to simply go to an English version of a Google site because Google insists that I must be…

> it is not straightforward at all to simply go to an English version of a Google site because Google insists that I must be Dutch and therefore only want localized information

This kills me when traveling. There's ways around it, but it's a bit of a hassle. Really one of my only hassles with Google, though I understand it probably serves 99%+ of searches better.

Re: Care about search privacy? Duck Duck Go no longer logs IPs.

#94

Post by mike-cardwell »

The search results page retrieves some content from s3.amazonaws.com. The http referer in those requests contains the search term. Thus, even though duckduckgo.com doesn't know you performed a search, amazonaws.com knows your IP address, what you searched for, and when you searched for it. They probably have a log of all that information too.

Re: Care about search privacy? Duck Duck Go no longer logs IPs.

#95

Post by Tichy »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #14
whatismyip2 wrote: post #11

He does log the browser string. The EFF's panopticlick project shows that this is a way to identify a user surprisingly uniquely.

Wow, really? Any references? I'd consider ditching them. They're not doing much for me anyway.

Ditching them would probably identify as "the guy without browser identification strings".

Re: Care about search privacy? Duck Duck Go no longer logs IPs.

#96

Post by evannyx »

lionhearted wrote: post #93
lena wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion Google results used to be great before they did all the personalizing, and now they are often really bad. I get infuriated sometimes how hard it is to search for a specific term. I have to use all kinds of + and - signs in my search terms to get anything near a meaningful result and it is not straightforward at all to simply go to an English version of a Google site because Google insists that I must be…

> it is not straightforward at all to simply go to an English version of a Google site because Google insists that I must be Dutch and therefore only want localized information This kills me when traveling. There's ways around it, but it's a bit of a hassle. Really one of my only hassles with Google, though I understand it probably serves 99%+ of searches better.

Try http://www.google.com/ncr

Re: Care about search privacy? Duck Duck Go no longer logs IPs.

#98

Post by epi0Bauqu »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #94

The search results page retrieves some content from s3.amazonaws.com. The http referer in those requests contains the search term. Thus, even though duckduckgo.com doesn't know you performed a search, amazonaws.com knows your IP address, what you searched for, and when you searched for it. They probably have a log of all that information too.

I'm in the process of changing these links to https.

Re: Care about search privacy? Duck Duck Go no longer logs IPs.

#99

Post by epi0Bauqu »

adrianwaj wrote: post #72

I prefer Google. The full link is in green, it's justified left, the results are wider and don't take as much vertical room. There's a cache too. What does DDG do better than Google? Does DDG have the crawling power of Google or does it pull in Google's results?

Our about page is now dedicated to answering this question: http://duckduckgo.com/about.html
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