2019 may finally be the year for 'The Search Engine That Doesn't Track
You'
<https://medium.com/s/story/nothing-can-stop-google-duckduckgo-is-tryin g-anyway-718eb7391423>
In late November, hotel conglomerate Marriott International disclosed
that the personal information of some 500 million
customers_-_including home addresses, phone numbers, and credit card numbers_-_had been exposed as part of a data breach affecting its
Starwood Hotels and Resorts network. One day earlier, the venerable
breakfast chain Dunkin' (nee Donuts) announced that its rewards
program had been compromised. Only two weeks before that, it was
revealed that a major two-factor authentication provider had exposed
millions of temporary account passwords and reset links for Google,
Amazon, HQ Trivia, Yahoo, and Microsoft users.
These were just the icing on the cake for a year of compromised data:
Adidas, Orbitz, Macy's, Under Armour, Sears, Forever 21, Whole Foods, Ticketfly, Delta, Panera Bread, and Best Buy, just to name a few, were
all affected by security breaches.
Meanwhile, there's a growing sense that the tech giants have finally
turned on their users. Amazon dominates so many facets of the online
shopping experience that legislators may have to rewrite antitrust law
to rein them in. Google has been playing fast and loose with its
"Don't Be Evil" mantra by almost launching a censored search engine
for the Chinese government while simultaneously developing killer A.I.
for Pentagon drones. And we now know that Facebook collected people's personal data without their consent, had third party deals that would
have allegedly made it possible for Spotify and Netflix to look at
users' private messages, fueled fake news and the rise of Donald
Trump, and was used to facilitate a genocide in Myanmar.
The backlash against these companies dominated our national discourse
in 2018. The European Union is cracking down on anticompetitive
practices at Amazon and Google. Both Facebook and Twitter have had
their turns in the congressional hot seat, facing questions from
slightly confused but definitely irate lawmakers about how the two
companies choose what information to show us and what they do with our
data when we're not looking. Worries over privacy have led everyone
from the New York Times to Brian Acton, the disgruntled co-founder of Facebook-owned WhatsApp, to call for a Facebook exodus. And judging by Facebook's stagnating rate of user growth, people seem to be
listening.
For Gabriel Weinberg, the founder and CEO of privacy-focused search
engine DuckDuckGo, our growing tech skepticism recalls the early
1900s, when Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle revealed the previously unexamined horrors of the meatpacking industry. "Industries have
historically gone through periods of almost ignorant bliss, and then
people start to expose how the sausage is being made," he says.
This, in a nutshell, is DuckDuckGo's proposition: "The big tech
companies are taking advantage of you by selling your data. We won't."
In effect, it's an anti-sales sales pitch. DuckDuckGo is perhaps the
most prominent in a number of small but rapidly growing firms
attempting to make it big_-_or at least sustainable_-_by putting their customers' privacy and security first. And unlike the previous
generation of privacy products, such as Tor or SecureDrop, these
services are easy to use and intuitive, and their user bases aren't exclusively composed of political activists, security researchers, and paranoiacs. The same day Weinberg and I spoke, DuckDuckGo's search
engine returned results for 33,626,258 queries_-_a new daily record
for the company. Weinberg estimates that since 2014, DuckDuckGo's
traffic has been increasing at a rate of "about 50 percent a year," a
claim backed up by the company's publicly available traffic data.
"You can run a profitable company_-_which we are_-_without [using] a surveillance business model," Weinberg says. If he's right, DuckDuckGo
stands to capitalize handsomely off our collective backlash against
the giants of the web economy and establish a prominent brand in the
coming era of data privacy. If he's wrong, his company looks more like
a last dying gasp before surveillance capitalism finally takes over
the world.
DuckDuckGo is based just east of nowhere. Not in the Bay Area, or New
York, or Weinberg's hometown of Atlanta, or in Boston, where he and
his wife met while attending MIT. Instead, DuckDuckGo headquarters is
set along a side street just off the main drag of Paoli, Pennsylvania,
in a building that looks like a cross between a Pennsylvania Dutch
house and a modest Catholic church, on the second floor above a laser
eye surgery center. Stained-glass windows look out onto the street,
and a small statue of an angel hangs precariously off the roof. On the
second floor, a door leading out to a balcony is framed by a pair of
friendly looking cartoon ducks, one of which wears an eye patch. Just
before DuckDuckGo's entrance sits a welcome mat that reads "COME BACK
WITH A WARRANT."
"People don't generally show up at our doorstep, but I hope that at
some point it'll be useful," Weinberg tells me, sitting on a couch a
few feet from an Aqua Teen Hunger Force mural that takes up a quarter
of a wall. At 39, he is energetic, affable, and generally much more at
ease with himself than the stereotypical tech CEO. The office around
us looks like it was furnished by the set designer of Ready Player
One: a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy print in the entryway,
Japanese-style panels depicting the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in
the bathroom, and a vintage-looking RoboCop pinball machine in the
break room. There's even a Lego model of the DeLorean from Back to the
Future on his desk. The furniture, Weinberg tells me, is mostly from
Ikea. The lamp in the communal area is a hand-me-down from his mom.
Weinberg learned basic programming on an Atari while he was still in elementary school. Before hitting puberty, he'd built an early
internet bulletin board. "It didn't really have a purpose" in the
beginning, Weinberg says. The one feature that made his bulletin board unique, he says, was that he hosted anonymous AMA-style question
panels with his father, an infectious disease doctor with substantial experience treating AIDS patients. This was during the early 1990s,
when the stigma surrounding HIV and AIDS remained so great that
doctors were known to deny treatment to those suffering from it.
Weinberg says that the free-and private-medical advice made the board
a valuable resource for the small number of people who found it. It
was an early instance of Weinberg's interest in facilitating access to information, as well as a cogent example of the power of online
privacy: "The ability to access informational resources anonymously
actually opens up that access significantly," he told me over email.
After graduating from MIT in 2001, Weinberg launched a slew of
businesses, none of which are particularly memorable. First there was
an educational software program called Learnection. ("Terrible name_
the idea was good, but 15 years too early," he says.) Then he
co-founded an early social networking company called Opobox, taking on
no employees and writing all the code himself. "Facebook just kind of obliterated it," Weinberg says, though he was able to sell the network
to the parent company of Classmates.com for roughly $10 million in
cash in 2006.
It was around that time when Weinberg began working on what would
become DuckDuckGo. Google had yet to achieve total hegemony over the
internet search field, and Weinberg felt that he could create a
browser plugin that might help eliminate the scourge of spammy search
results in other search engines.
To build an algorithm that weeded out bad search results, he first had
to do it by hand. "I took a large sample of different pages and
hand-marked them as 'spam' or 'not spam.'" The process of scraping the
web, Weinberg says, inadvertently earned him a visit from the FBI.
"Once they realized I was just crawling the web, they just went away,"
he says. He also experimented with creating a proto-Quora service that allowed anyone to pose a question and have it answered by someone
else, as well as a free alternative to Meetup.com. Eventually, he
combined facets of all three efforts into a full-on search engine.
When Weinberg first launched DuckDuckGo in 2008_-_the name is a wink
to the children's game of skipping over the wrong options to get to
the right one_-_he differentiated his search engine by offering
instant answers to basic questions (essentially an early open-source
version of Google's Answer Box), spam filtering, and highly
customizable search results based on user preferences. "Those [were]
things that early adopters kind of appreciated," he says.
At the time, Weinberg says, consumer privacy was not a central
concern. In 2009, when he made the decision to stop collecting
personal search data, it was more a matter of practicality than a
principled decision about civil liberties. Instead of storing troves
of data on every user and targeting those users individually,
DuckDuckGo would simply sell ads against search keywords. Most of DuckDuckGo's revenue, he explains, is still generated this way. The
system doesn't capitalize on targeted ads, but, Weinberg says, "I
think there's a choice between squeezing out every ounce of profit and
making ethical decisions that aren't at the expense of society."
Until 2011, Weinberg was DuckDuckGo's sole full-time employee. That
year, he pushed to expand the company. He bought a billboard in
Google's backyard of San Francisco that proudly proclaimed, "Google
tracks you. We don't." (That defiant gesture and others like it were
later parodied on HBO's Silicon Valley.) The stunt paid off in spades, doubling DuckDuckGo's daily search traffic. Weinberg began courting VC investors, eventually selling a minority stake in the company to Union
Square Ventures, the firm that has also backed SoundCloud, Coinbase, Kickstarter, and Stripe. That fall, he hired his first full-time
employee, and DuckDuckGo moved out of Weinberg's house and into the strangest-looking office in all of Paoli, Pennsylvania.
Then, in 2013, digital privacy became front-page news. That year, NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked a series of documents to the Guardian
and the Washington Post revealing the existence of the NSA's PRISM
program, which granted the agency unfettered access to the personal
data of millions of Americans through a secret back door into the
servers of Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, and other major internet
firms. Though Google denied any knowledge of the program, the
reputational damage had been done. DuckDuckGo rode a wave of press
coverage, enjoying placement in stories that offered data privacy
solutions to millions of newly freaked-out people worried that the
government was spying on them.
"All of a sudden we were part of this international story," Weinberg
says. The next year, DuckDuckGo turned a profit. Shortly thereafter,
Weinberg finally started paying himself a salary.
Today, DuckDuckGo employs 55 people, most of whom work remotely from
around the world. (On the day I visited, there were maybe five
employees in the Paoli office, plus one dog.) This year, the company
went through its second funding round of VC funding, accepting a $10
million investment from Canadian firm OMERS. Weinberg insists that
both OMERS and Union Square Ventures are "deeply interested in privacy
and restoring power to the non-monopoly providers." Later, via email, Weinberg declined to share DuckDuckGo's exact revenue, beyond the fact
that its 2018 gross revenue exceeded $25 million, a figure the company
has chosen to disclose in order to stress that it is subject to the California Consumer Privacy Act. Weinberg feels that the company's
main challenge these days is improving brand recognition.
"I don't think there's many trustworthy entities on the internet, just straight-up," he says. "Ads follow people around. Most people have
gotten multiple data breaches. Most people know somebody who's had
some kind of identity theft issue. The percentage of people who've had
those events happen to them has just grown and grown."
The recent investment from OMERS has helped cover the cost of
DuckDuckGo's new app, launched in January 2018. The app, a lightweight
mobile web browser for iOS and Android that's also available as a
Chrome plugin, is built around the DuckDuckGo search engine. It gives
each site you visit a letter grade based on its privacy practices and
has an option to let you know which web trackers_-_usually ones from
Google, Facebook, or Comscore_-_it blocked from monitoring your
browsing activity. After you've finished surfing, you can press a
little flame icon and an oddly satisfying animated fire engulfs your
screen, indicating that you've deleted your tabs and cleared your
search history.
The rest of the recent investment, Weinberg says, has been spent on
"trying to explain to people in the world that [DuckDuckGo] exists."
He continues, "That's our main issue_-_the vast majority of people
don't realize there's a simple solution to reduce their [online]
footprint." To that end, DuckDuckGo maintains an in-house consumer
advocacy blog called Spread Privacy, offering helpful tips on how to
protect yourself online as well as commentary and analysis on the
state of online surveillance. Its most recent initiative was a study
on how filter bubbles_-_the term for how a site like Google uses our
data to show us what it thinks we want_-_can shape the political news
we consume.
Brand recognition is a challenge for a lot of startups offering privacy-focused digital services. After all, the competition includes
some of the biggest and most prominent companies in the world: Google,
Apple, Facebook. And in some ways, this is an entire new sector of the market. "Privacy has traditionally not been a product; it's been more
like a set of best practices," says David Temkin, chief product
officer for the Brave web browser. "Imagine turning that set of best practices into a product. That's kind of where we're going."
Like DuckDuckGo_-_whose search engine Brave incorporates into its
private browsing mode_-_Brave doesn't collect user data and blocks ads
and web trackers by default. In 2018, Brave's user base exploded from
1 million to 5.5 million, and the company reached a deal with HTC to
be the default browser on the manufacturer's upcoming Exodus
smartphone.
Temkin, who first moved out to the Bay Area in the early '90s to work
at Apple, says that the past two decades of consolidation under Google/Facebook/Netflix/Apple/Amazon have radically upended the notion
of the internet as a safe haven for the individual. "It's swung back
to a very centralized model," he says. "The digital advertising
landscape has turned into a surveillance ecosystem. The way to
optimize the value of advertising is through better targeting and
better data collection. And, well, water goes downhill."
In companies such as Brave and DuckDuckGo, Temkin sees a return to the
more conscientious attitude behind early personal computing. "I think
to an ordinary user, [privacy] is starting to sound like something
they do need to care about," he says.
But to succeed, these companies will have to make privacy as
accessible and simple as possible. "Privacy's not gonna win if it's a specialist tool that requires an expert to wield," Temkin says. "What
we're doing is trying to package [those practices] in a way that's
empathetic and respectful to the user but doesn't impose the
requirement for knowledge or the regular ongoing annoyance that might
go with maintaining privacy on your own."
In November, I decided to switch my personal search querying to
DuckDuckGo in order to see whether it was a feasible solution to my
online surveillance woes. Physically making the switch is relatively seamless. The search engine is already an optional default in browsers
such as Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox, as well as more niche
browsers such as Brave and Tor, the latter of which made DuckDuckGo
its default search in 2016.
Actually using the service, though, can be slightly disorienting. I
use Google on a daily basis for one simple reason: It's easy. When I
need to find something online, it knows what to look for. To boot, it
gives me free email, which is connected to the free word processor
that my editor and I are using to work on this article together in
real time. It knows me. It's only when I consider the implications of
handing over a digital record of my life to a massive company that the
sense of free-floating dread about digital surveillance kicks in.
Otherwise, it's great. And that's the exact hurdle DuckDuckGo is
trying to convince people to clear.
Using DuckDuckGo can feel like relearning to walk after you've spent a
decade flying. On Google, a search for, say, "vape shop" yields a map
of vape shops in my area. On DuckDuckGo, that same search returns a
list of online vaporizer retailers. The difference, of course, is the
data: Google knows that I'm in Durham, North Carolina. As far as
DuckDuckGo is concerned, I may as well be on the moon.
That's not to say using DuckDuckGo is all bad. For one, it can feel
mildly revelatory knowing that you're seeing the same search results
that anyone else would. It restores a sense of objectivity to the
internet at a time when being online can feel like stepping into The
Truman Show_-_a world created to serve and revolve around you. And I
was able to look up stuff I wanted to know about_-_how to open a vacuum-sealed mattress I'd bought off the internet, the origin of the martingale dog collar, the latest insane thing Donald Trump did_-_all
without the possibility of my search history coming back to haunt me
in the form of ads for bedding, dog leashes, or anti-Trump
knickknacks. Without personalized results, DuckDuckGo just needs to
know what most people are looking for when they type in search terms
and serve against that. And most of the time, we fit the profile of
most people.
When I asked Weinberg if he wanted to displace Google as the top
search engine in all the land, he demurred. "I mean, I wouldn't be
opposed to it," he says, "but it's really not our intention, and I
don't expect that to happen." Instead, he'd like to see DuckDuckGo as
a "second option" to Google for people who are interested in
maintaining their online anonymity. "Even if you don't have anything
to hide, it doesn't mean you want people to profit off your
information or be manipulated or biased against as a result [of that information]," he says.
Even though DuckDuckGo may serve a different market and never even
challenge Google head-on, the search giant remains its largest hurdle
in the long term. For more than a decade, Google has been synonymous
with search. And that association is hard, if not impossible, to
break.
In the meantime, the two companies are on frosty terms. In 2010,
Google obtained the domain duck.com as part of a larger business deal
in a company formerly known as Duck Co. For years, the domain would
redirect to Google's search page, despite seeming like something you'd
type into your browser while trying to get to DuckDuckGo. After
DuckDuckGo petitioned for ownership for nearly a decade, Google
finally handed over the domain in December. The acquisition was a
minor branding coup for DuckDuckGo_-_and a potential hedge against accusations of antitrust for Google.
That doesn't mean relations between the two companies have improved.
As the Goliath in the room, Google could attempt to undercut
DuckDuckGo's entire business proposition. Over the past few years,
even mainstream players have attempted to assuage our privacy
anxieties by offering VPNs (Verizon), hosting "privacy pop-ups"
(Facebook), and using their billions to fight against state
surveillance in court (Microsoft). With some tweaks, Google could
essentially copy DuckDuckGo wholesale and create its own
privacy-focused search engine with many of the same protections
DuckDuckGo has built its business on. As to whether people would
actually believe that Google, a company that muscled its way into
becoming an integral part of the online infrastructure by selling
people's data, could suddenly transform into a guardian of that data
remains to be seen.
When it comes to the internet, trust is something easily lost and
difficult to regain. In a sense, every time a giant of the internet surveillance economy is revealed to have sold out its customers in
some innovatively horrifying way, the ensuing chaos almost serves as
free advertising for DuckDuckGo. "The world keeps going in a bad
direction, and it makes people think, 'Hey, I would like to escape
some of the bad stuff on the internet and go to a safer place,'"
Weinberg says. "And that's where we see ourselves."
duckduck is a flawed search engine. Slow as hell, often does not even
load.
"(p)ing^~dvox:::::::::z" <dvox@hotbot.com> wrote in news:q45eo5$4hi$2@neodomea5yrhcabc.onion:
2019 may finally be the year for 'The Search Engine That Doesn't Track
You' <https://medium.com/s/story/nothing-can-stop-google-duckduckgo-is-tryin g-anyway-718eb7391423>
Until 2011, Weinberg was DuckDuckGo's sole full-time employee. That
year, he pushed to expand the company. He bought a billboard in
Google's backyard of San Francisco that proudly proclaimed, "Google
tracks you. We don't."
Using DuckDuckGo can feel like relearning to walk after you've spent a decade flying. On Google, a search for, say, "vape shop" yields a map
of vape shops in my area. On DuckDuckGo, that same search returns a
list of online vaporizer retailers. The difference, of course, is the
data: Google knows that I'm in Durham, North Carolina. As far as
DuckDuckGo is concerned, I may as well be on the moon.
duckduck is a flawed search engine. Slow as hell, often does not even
load. How you know they are not tracking you?? Google is EVIL, only a
matter of time before TRUMP goes after all the corrupt companies.
duckduck is a flawed search engine. Slow as hell, often does not even
load. How you know they are not tracking you?? Google is EVIL, only a
matter of time before TRUMP goes after all the corrupt companies.
In comp.misc, whodunit <whodunit@notme.org> wrote:
"(p)ing^~dvox:::::::::z" <dvox@hotbot.com> wrote in
news:q45eo5$4hi$2@neodomea5yrhcabc.onion:
2019 may finally be the year for 'The Search Engine That Doesn't Track
You'
<https://medium.com/s/story/nothing-can-stop-google-duckduckgo-is-tryin
g-anyway-718eb7391423>
Medium: the text site that likes to track your mouse movements for some reason. Definitely not high on my list of privacy friendly places to
find content. Fortunately it does work well in lynx.
Until 2011, Weinberg was DuckDuckGo's sole full-time employee. That
year, he pushed to expand the company. He bought a billboard in
Google's backyard of San Francisco that proudly proclaimed, "Google
tracks you. We don't."
I don't remember when I started using DuckDuckGo. My personal archive
of netnews posts shows 2011 was the first year I mentioned it in a post.
Using DuckDuckGo can feel like relearning to walk after you've spent a
decade flying. On Google, a search for, say, "vape shop" yields a map
of vape shops in my area. On DuckDuckGo, that same search returns a
list of online vaporizer retailers. The difference, of course, is the
data: Google knows that I'm in Durham, North Carolina. As far as
DuckDuckGo is concerned, I may as well be on the moon.
Yeah, sure. But I've had DDG as default search engine for at least four
years now and gotten used to typing "$item store $city $state". So when
I accidently use Google it feels kinda creepy, not like "flying".
duckduck is a flawed search engine. Slow as hell, often does not even
load. How you know they are not tracking you?? Google is EVIL, only a
matter of time before TRUMP goes after all the corrupt companies.
I have never had DDG fail to load, and I doubt you've tried the wifi in
Hell.
Trump won't manage it. His own corruption will sink him fiurst.
On 2019-03-08, Bob Eager <news0073@eager.cx> wrote:
Trump won't manage it. His own corruption will sink him fiurst.
Perhaps, but compared to the Clintons he's a saint.
On 2019-03-08, Bob Eager <news0073@eager.cx> wrote:
Trump won't manage it. His own corruption will sink him fiurst.
Perhaps, but compared to the Clintons he's a saint.
In article <XnsAA0D2F53E4AF1awerwkwhodoneew92d@202.81.252.44>,
whodunit <whodunit@notme.org> wrote:
duckduck is a flawed search engine. Slow as hell, often does not even
load.
On what world? It's been working just fine for me the past few months I've been using it.
In comp.misc, whodunit <whodunit@notme.org> wrote:
"(p)ing^~dvox:::::::::z" <dvox@hotbot.com> wrote in
news:q45eo5$4hi$2@neodomea5yrhcabc.onion:
2019 may finally be the year for 'The Search Engine That Doesn't
Track You'
<https://medium.com/s/story/nothing-can-stop-google-duckduckgo-is-tr
yin g-anyway-718eb7391423>
Medium: the text site that likes to track your mouse movements for
some reason. Definitely not high on my list of privacy friendly places
to find content. Fortunately it does work well in lynx.
Until 2011, Weinberg was DuckDuckGo's sole full-time employee. That
year, he pushed to expand the company. He bought a billboard in
Google's backyard of San Francisco that proudly proclaimed, "Google
tracks you. We don't."
I don't remember when I started using DuckDuckGo. My personal archive
of netnews posts shows 2011 was the first year I mentioned it in a
post.
Using DuckDuckGo can feel like relearning to walk after you've
spent a decade flying. On Google, a search for, say, "vape shop"
yields a map of vape shops in my area. On DuckDuckGo, that same
search returns a list of online vaporizer retailers. The
difference, of course, is the data: Google knows that I'm in
Durham, North Carolina. As far as DuckDuckGo is concerned, I may as
well be on the moon.
Yeah, sure. But I've had DDG as default search engine for at least
four years now and gotten used to typing "$item store $city $state".
So when I accidently use Google it feels kinda creepy, not like
"flying".
duckduck is a flawed search engine. Slow as hell, often does not even
load. How you know they are not tracking you?? Google is EVIL, only a
matter of time before TRUMP goes after all the corrupt companies.
I have never had DDG fail to load, and I doubt you've tried the wifi
in Hell. Hard to prove they aren't tracking you, but easy to prove
Google is tracking you. It's an easy choice for me. Want to completely
stop Internet companies from tracking you? Don't use the Internet.
It's really hard though, since other people use the Internet on your
behalf all the time. Consider my mother-in-law, who doesn't want to
use her credit card "on the Internet". So she calls, say, an airline
to buy tickets and reads out the card number over the phone. Ignoring
that the person on the other end is probably using a VoIP phone, they
are just sitting in front of a computer with a special web portal
opened up and typing her card number into their web page, to send over
the Internet.
Elijah
------
ditto paying an electric bill
If you do an exhaustive search there are MANY other search engines that
do not track you that are FASTER than DUCK, better than DUCK. Duck sucks, slow as hell and does not give good results, no advanced searching,
doesn't follow normal advanced syntax.
On 2019-03-08, Bob Eager <news0073@eager.cx> wrote:
Trump won't manage it. His own corruption will sink him fiurst.
Perhaps, but compared to the Clintons he's a saint.
Roger Blake <rogblake@iname.invalid> wrote:
On 2019-03-08, Bob Eager <news0073@eager.cx> wrote:
Trump won't manage it. His own corruption will sink him fiurst.
Perhaps, but compared to the Clintons he's a saint.
"Gee, putting my head in this stamping press while it's running sure seems
dangerous!"
"Oh, don't worry, it's as hazardous as putting your head in the bandsaw."
In comp.misc nunnurbiz <whodunit@notme.org> wrote:
If you do an exhaustive search there are MANY other search engines
that do not track you that are FASTER than DUCK, better than DUCK.
Duck sucks, slow as hell and does not give good results, no advanced
searching, doesn't follow normal advanced syntax.
I attempted an exhaustive search a while ago when DDG search links
stopped working in my preferred web browser, Dillo. I found many
search engines with worse results than DDG, some that were much
slower and unreliable, but none besides Google that could provide equivalently relevant results for my test search terms.
Of course maybe the good ones were all incompatible with Dillo as
well, in which case I wouldn't have looked at them long enough to
remember them. It looks like Bing might have worked, but M$ is no
better than Google in my opinion.
Thankfully DDG eventually got the URL parameter working, which was
always meant to disable the feature that made it incompatible with
Dillo, but had stopped working for some reason.
If you guys cannot
find the good engines out there, your not looking/testing very well.
not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) wrote in news:q699ol$15f0$1@gioia.aioe.org:
In comp.misc nunnurbiz <whodunit@notme.org> wrote:
If you do an exhaustive search there are MANY other search engines
that do not track you that are FASTER than DUCK, better than DUCK.
Duck sucks, slow as hell and does not give good results, no advanced
searching, doesn't follow normal advanced syntax.
I attempted an exhaustive search a while ago when DDG search links
stopped working in my preferred web browser, Dillo. I found many
search engines with worse results than DDG, some that were much
slower and unreliable, but none besides Google that could provide
equivalently relevant results for my test search terms.
Of course maybe the good ones were all incompatible with Dillo as
well, in which case I wouldn't have looked at them long enough to
remember them. It looks like Bing might have worked, but M$ is no
better than Google in my opinion.
Thankfully DDG eventually got the URL parameter working, which was
always meant to disable the feature that made it incompatible with
Dillo, but had stopped working for some reason.
Sorry but you're wrong. Duck does not play well with TOR.
And there's an extra step to divert you to their
"non-javascript" engine.
Ok if you want
to use javascript, but there goes your privacy. Duck fails to load
frequently and when it does load it's slow.
YOu cannot use advanced syntax (at least none I have found) and it
just returns wrong or incomplete results.
At least with google you can use advanced syntax, but
that's not a big enough reason to use EVIL google. If you guys cannot
find the good engines out there, your not looking/testing very well.
In comp.misc nunnurbiz <whodunit@notme.org> wrote:
At least with google you can use advanced syntax, butI think I looked hard, and you're hardly going to convince me
that's not a big enough reason to use EVIL google. If you guys cannot
find the good engines out there, your not looking/testing very well.
otherwise while keeping your reported assortment of wonderful search
engine links to yourself.
Sorry but you're wrong. Duck does not play well with TOR.
If you guys cannot find the good engines out there, your [sic] not >looking/testing very well.
In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
In comp.misc nunnurbiz <whodunit@notme.org> wrote:
At least with google you can use advanced syntax, butI think I looked hard, and you're hardly going to convince me
that's not a big enough reason to use EVIL google. If you guys cannot
find the good engines out there, your not looking/testing very well.
otherwise while keeping your reported assortment of wonderful search
engine links to yourself.
Alta Vista, 1995 version, has the best advanced search.
Change my mind.
2019 may finally be the year for 'The Search Engine That Doesn't Tracktryin
You'
<https://medium.com/s/story/nothing-can-stop-google-duckduckgo-is-
g-anyway-718eb7391423>
In late November, hotel conglomerate Marriott International disclosed
that the personal information of some 500 million
customers_-_including home addresses, phone numbers, and credit card numbers_-_had been exposed as part of a data breach affecting its
Starwood Hotels and Resorts network. One day earlier, the venerable
breakfast chain Dunkin' (nee Donuts) announced that its rewards
program had been compromised. Only two weeks before that, it was
revealed that a major two-factor authentication provider had exposed
millions of temporary account passwords and reset links for Google,
Amazon, HQ Trivia, Yahoo, and Microsoft users.
These were just the icing on the cake for a year of compromised data:
Adidas, Orbitz, Macy's, Under Armour, Sears, Forever 21, Whole Foods, Ticketfly, Delta, Panera Bread, and Best Buy, just to name a few, were
all affected by security breaches.
Meanwhile, there's a growing sense that the tech giants have finally
turned on their users. Amazon dominates so many facets of the online
shopping experience that legislators may have to rewrite antitrust law
to rein them in. Google has been playing fast and loose with its
"Don't Be Evil" mantra by almost launching a censored search engine
for the Chinese government while simultaneously developing killer A.I.
for Pentagon drones. And we now know that Facebook collected people's personal data without their consent, had third party deals that would
have allegedly made it possible for Spotify and Netflix to look at
users' private messages, fueled fake news and the rise of Donald
Trump, and was used to facilitate a genocide in Myanmar.
The backlash against these companies dominated our national discourse
in 2018. The European Union is cracking down on anticompetitive
practices at Amazon and Google. Both Facebook and Twitter have had
their turns in the congressional hot seat, facing questions from
slightly confused but definitely irate lawmakers about how the two
companies choose what information to show us and what they do with our
data when we're not looking. Worries over privacy have led everyone
from the New York Times to Brian Acton, the disgruntled co-founder of Facebook-owned WhatsApp, to call for a Facebook exodus. And judging by Facebook's stagnating rate of user growth, people seem to be
listening.
For Gabriel Weinberg, the founder and CEO of privacy-focused search
engine DuckDuckGo, our growing tech skepticism recalls the early
1900s, when Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle revealed the previously unexamined horrors of the meatpacking industry. "Industries have
historically gone through periods of almost ignorant bliss, and then
people start to expose how the sausage is being made," he says.
This, in a nutshell, is DuckDuckGo's proposition: "The big tech
companies are taking advantage of you by selling your data. We won't."
In effect, it's an anti-sales sales pitch. DuckDuckGo is perhaps the
most prominent in a number of small but rapidly growing firms
attempting to make it big_-_or at least sustainable_-_by putting their customers' privacy and security first. And unlike the previous
generation of privacy products, such as Tor or SecureDrop, these
services are easy to use and intuitive, and their user bases aren't exclusively composed of political activists, security researchers, and paranoiacs. The same day Weinberg and I spoke, DuckDuckGo's search
engine returned results for 33,626,258 queries_-_a new daily record
for the company. Weinberg estimates that since 2014, DuckDuckGo's
traffic has been increasing at a rate of "about 50 percent a year," a
claim backed up by the company's publicly available traffic data.
"You can run a profitable company_-_which we are_-_without [using] a surveillance business model," Weinberg says. If he's right, DuckDuckGo
stands to capitalize handsomely off our collective backlash against
the giants of the web economy and establish a prominent brand in the
coming era of data privacy. If he's wrong, his company looks more like
a last dying gasp before surveillance capitalism finally takes over
the world.
DuckDuckGo is based just east of nowhere. Not in the Bay Area, or New
York, or Weinberg's hometown of Atlanta, or in Boston, where he and
his wife met while attending MIT. Instead, DuckDuckGo headquarters is
set along a side street just off the main drag of Paoli, Pennsylvania,
in a building that looks like a cross between a Pennsylvania Dutch
house and a modest Catholic church, on the second floor above a laser
eye surgery center. Stained-glass windows look out onto the street,
and a small statue of an angel hangs precariously off the roof. On the
second floor, a door leading out to a balcony is framed by a pair of
friendly looking cartoon ducks, one of which wears an eye patch. Just
before DuckDuckGo's entrance sits a welcome mat that reads "COME BACK
WITH A WARRANT."
"People don't generally show up at our doorstep, but I hope that at
some point it'll be useful," Weinberg tells me, sitting on a couch a
few feet from an Aqua Teen Hunger Force mural that takes up a quarter
of a wall. At 39, he is energetic, affable, and generally much more at
ease with himself than the stereotypical tech CEO. The office around
us looks like it was furnished by the set designer of Ready Player
One: a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy print in the entryway,
Japanese-style panels depicting the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in
the bathroom, and a vintage-looking RoboCop pinball machine in the
break room. There's even a Lego model of the DeLorean from Back to the
Future on his desk. The furniture, Weinberg tells me, is mostly from
Ikea. The lamp in the communal area is a hand-me-down from his mom.
Weinberg learned basic programming on an Atari while he was still in elementary school. Before hitting puberty, he'd built an early
internet bulletin board. "It didn't really have a purpose" in the
beginning, Weinberg says. The one feature that made his bulletin board unique, he says, was that he hosted anonymous AMA-style question
panels with his father, an infectious disease doctor with substantial experience treating AIDS patients. This was during the early 1990s,
when the stigma surrounding HIV and AIDS remained so great that
doctors were known to deny treatment to those suffering from it.
Weinberg says that the free-and private-medical advice made the board
a valuable resource for the small number of people who found it. It
was an early instance of Weinberg's interest in facilitating access to information, as well as a cogent example of the power of online
privacy: "The ability to access informational resources anonymously
actually opens up that access significantly," he told me over email.
After graduating from MIT in 2001, Weinberg launched a slew of
businesses, none of which are particularly memorable. First there was
an educational software program called Learnection. ("Terrible name_
the idea was good, but 15 years too early," he says.) Then he
co-founded an early social networking company called Opobox, taking on
no employees and writing all the code himself. "Facebook just kind of obliterated it," Weinberg says, though he was able to sell the network
to the parent company of Classmates.com for roughly $10 million in
cash in 2006.
It was around that time when Weinberg began working on what would
become DuckDuckGo. Google had yet to achieve total hegemony over the
internet search field, and Weinberg felt that he could create a
browser plugin that might help eliminate the scourge of spammy search
results in other search engines.
To build an algorithm that weeded out bad search results, he first had
to do it by hand. "I took a large sample of different pages and
hand-marked them as 'spam' or 'not spam.'" The process of scraping the
web, Weinberg says, inadvertently earned him a visit from the FBI.
"Once they realized I was just crawling the web, they just went away,"
he says. He also experimented with creating a proto-Quora service that allowed anyone to pose a question and have it answered by someone
else, as well as a free alternative to Meetup.com. Eventually, he
combined facets of all three efforts into a full-on search engine.
When Weinberg first launched DuckDuckGo in 2008_-_the name is a wink
to the children's game of skipping over the wrong options to get to
the right one_-_he differentiated his search engine by offering
instant answers to basic questions (essentially an early open-source
version of Google's Answer Box), spam filtering, and highly
customizable search results based on user preferences. "Those [were]
things that early adopters kind of appreciated," he says.
At the time, Weinberg says, consumer privacy was not a central
concern. In 2009, when he made the decision to stop collecting
personal search data, it was more a matter of practicality than a
principled decision about civil liberties. Instead of storing troves
of data on every user and targeting those users individually,
DuckDuckGo would simply sell ads against search keywords. Most of DuckDuckGo's revenue, he explains, is still generated this way. The
system doesn't capitalize on targeted ads, but, Weinberg says, "I
think there's a choice between squeezing out every ounce of profit and
making ethical decisions that aren't at the expense of society."
Until 2011, Weinberg was DuckDuckGo's sole full-time employee. That
year, he pushed to expand the company. He bought a billboard in
Google's backyard of San Francisco that proudly proclaimed, "Google
tracks you. We don't." (That defiant gesture and others like it were
later parodied on HBO's Silicon Valley.) The stunt paid off in spades, doubling DuckDuckGo's daily search traffic. Weinberg began courting VC investors, eventually selling a minority stake in the company to Union
Square Ventures, the firm that has also backed SoundCloud, Coinbase, Kickstarter, and Stripe. That fall, he hired his first full-time
employee, and DuckDuckGo moved out of Weinberg's house and into the strangest-looking office in all of Paoli, Pennsylvania.
Then, in 2013, digital privacy became front-page news. That year, NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked a series of documents to the Guardian
and the Washington Post revealing the existence of the NSA's PRISM
program, which granted the agency unfettered access to the personal
data of millions of Americans through a secret back door into the
servers of Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, and other major internet
firms. Though Google denied any knowledge of the program, the
reputational damage had been done. DuckDuckGo rode a wave of press
coverage, enjoying placement in stories that offered data privacy
solutions to millions of newly freaked-out people worried that the
government was spying on them.
"All of a sudden we were part of this international story," Weinberg
says. The next year, DuckDuckGo turned a profit. Shortly thereafter,
Weinberg finally started paying himself a salary.
Today, DuckDuckGo employs 55 people, most of whom work remotely from
around the world. (On the day I visited, there were maybe five
employees in the Paoli office, plus one dog.) This year, the company
went through its second funding round of VC funding, accepting a $10
million investment from Canadian firm OMERS. Weinberg insists that
both OMERS and Union Square Ventures are "deeply interested in privacy
and restoring power to the non-monopoly providers." Later, via email, Weinberg declined to share DuckDuckGo's exact revenue, beyond the fact
that its 2018 gross revenue exceeded $25 million, a figure the company
has chosen to disclose in order to stress that it is subject to the California Consumer Privacy Act. Weinberg feels that the company's
main challenge these days is improving brand recognition.
"I don't think there's many trustworthy entities on the internet, just straight-up," he says. "Ads follow people around. Most people have
gotten multiple data breaches. Most people know somebody who's had
some kind of identity theft issue. The percentage of people who've had
those events happen to them has just grown and grown."
The recent investment from OMERS has helped cover the cost of
DuckDuckGo's new app, launched in January 2018. The app, a lightweight
mobile web browser for iOS and Android that's also available as a
Chrome plugin, is built around the DuckDuckGo search engine. It gives
each site you visit a letter grade based on its privacy practices and
has an option to let you know which web trackers_-_usually ones from
Google, Facebook, or Comscore_-_it blocked from monitoring your
browsing activity. After you've finished surfing, you can press a
little flame icon and an oddly satisfying animated fire engulfs your
screen, indicating that you've deleted your tabs and cleared your
search history.
The rest of the recent investment, Weinberg says, has been spent on
"trying to explain to people in the world that [DuckDuckGo] exists."
He continues, "That's our main issue_-_the vast majority of people
don't realize there's a simple solution to reduce their [online]
footprint." To that end, DuckDuckGo maintains an in-house consumer
advocacy blog called Spread Privacy, offering helpful tips on how to
protect yourself online as well as commentary and analysis on the
state of online surveillance. Its most recent initiative was a study
on how filter bubbles_-_the term for how a site like Google uses our
data to show us what it thinks we want_-_can shape the political news
we consume.
Brand recognition is a challenge for a lot of startups offering privacy-focused digital services. After all, the competition includes
some of the biggest and most prominent companies in the world: Google,
Apple, Facebook. And in some ways, this is an entire new sector of the market. "Privacy has traditionally not been a product; it's been more
like a set of best practices," says David Temkin, chief product
officer for the Brave web browser. "Imagine turning that set of best practices into a product. That's kind of where we're going."
Like DuckDuckGo_-_whose search engine Brave incorporates into its
private browsing mode_-_Brave doesn't collect user data and blocks ads
and web trackers by default. In 2018, Brave's user base exploded from
1 million to 5.5 million, and the company reached a deal with HTC to
be the default browser on the manufacturer's upcoming Exodus
smartphone.
Temkin, who first moved out to the Bay Area in the early '90s to work
at Apple, says that the past two decades of consolidation under Google/Facebook/Netflix/Apple/Amazon have radically upended the notion
of the internet as a safe haven for the individual. "It's swung back
to a very centralized model," he says. "The digital advertising
landscape has turned into a surveillance ecosystem. The way to
optimize the value of advertising is through better targeting and
better data collection. And, well, water goes downhill."
In companies such as Brave and DuckDuckGo, Temkin sees a return to the
more conscientious attitude behind early personal computing. "I think
to an ordinary user, [privacy] is starting to sound like something
they do need to care about," he says.
But to succeed, these companies will have to make privacy as
accessible and simple as possible. "Privacy's not gonna win if it's a specialist tool that requires an expert to wield," Temkin says. "What
we're doing is trying to package [those practices] in a way that's
empathetic and respectful to the user but doesn't impose the
requirement for knowledge or the regular ongoing annoyance that might
go with maintaining privacy on your own."
In November, I decided to switch my personal search querying to
DuckDuckGo in order to see whether it was a feasible solution to my
online surveillance woes. Physically making the switch is relatively seamless. The search engine is already an optional default in browsers
such as Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox, as well as more niche
browsers such as Brave and Tor, the latter of which made DuckDuckGo
its default search in 2016.
Actually using the service, though, can be slightly disorienting. I
use Google on a daily basis for one simple reason: It's easy. When I
need to find something online, it knows what to look for. To boot, it
gives me free email, which is connected to the free word processor
that my editor and I are using to work on this article together in
real time. It knows me. It's only when I consider the implications of
handing over a digital record of my life to a massive company that the
sense of free-floating dread about digital surveillance kicks in.
Otherwise, it's great. And that's the exact hurdle DuckDuckGo is
trying to convince people to clear.
Using DuckDuckGo can feel like relearning to walk after you've spent a
decade flying. On Google, a search for, say, "vape shop" yields a map
of vape shops in my area. On DuckDuckGo, that same search returns a
list of online vaporizer retailers. The difference, of course, is the
data: Google knows that I'm in Durham, North Carolina. As far as
DuckDuckGo is concerned, I may as well be on the moon.
That's not to say using DuckDuckGo is all bad. For one, it can feel
mildly revelatory knowing that you're seeing the same search results
that anyone else would. It restores a sense of objectivity to the
internet at a time when being online can feel like stepping into The
Truman Show_-_a world created to serve and revolve around you. And I
was able to look up stuff I wanted to know about_-_how to open a vacuum-sealed mattress I'd bought off the internet, the origin of the martingale dog collar, the latest insane thing Donald Trump did_-_all
without the possibility of my search history coming back to haunt me
in the form of ads for bedding, dog leashes, or anti-Trump
knickknacks. Without personalized results, DuckDuckGo just needs to
know what most people are looking for when they type in search terms
and serve against that. And most of the time, we fit the profile of
most people.
When I asked Weinberg if he wanted to displace Google as the top
search engine in all the land, he demurred. "I mean, I wouldn't be
opposed to it," he says, "but it's really not our intention, and I
don't expect that to happen." Instead, he'd like to see DuckDuckGo as
a "second option" to Google for people who are interested in
maintaining their online anonymity. "Even if you don't have anything
to hide, it doesn't mean you want people to profit off your
information or be manipulated or biased against as a result [of that information]," he says.
Even though DuckDuckGo may serve a different market and never even
challenge Google head-on, the search giant remains its largest hurdle
in the long term. For more than a decade, Google has been synonymous
with search. And that association is hard, if not impossible, to
break.
In the meantime, the two companies are on frosty terms. In 2010,
Google obtained the domain duck.com as part of a larger business deal
in a company formerly known as Duck Co. For years, the domain would
redirect to Google's search page, despite seeming like something you'd
type into your browser while trying to get to DuckDuckGo. After
DuckDuckGo petitioned for ownership for nearly a decade, Google
finally handed over the domain in December. The acquisition was a
minor branding coup for DuckDuckGo_-_and a potential hedge against accusations of antitrust for Google.
That doesn't mean relations between the two companies have improved.
As the Goliath in the room, Google could attempt to undercut
DuckDuckGo's entire business proposition. Over the past few years,
even mainstream players have attempted to assuage our privacy
anxieties by offering VPNs (Verizon), hosting "privacy pop-ups"
(Facebook), and using their billions to fight against state
surveillance in court (Microsoft). With some tweaks, Google could
essentially copy DuckDuckGo wholesale and create its own
privacy-focused search engine with many of the same protections
DuckDuckGo has built its business on. As to whether people would
actually believe that Google, a company that muscled its way into
becoming an integral part of the online infrastructure by selling
people's data, could suddenly transform into a guardian of that data
remains to be seen.
When it comes to the internet, trust is something easily lost and
difficult to regain. In a sense, every time a giant of the internet surveillance economy is revealed to have sold out its customers in
some innovatively horrifying way, the ensuing chaos almost serves as
free advertising for DuckDuckGo. "The world keeps going in a bad
direction, and it makes people think, 'Hey, I would like to escape
some of the bad stuff on the internet and go to a safer place,'"
Weinberg says. "And that's where we see ourselves."
"(p)ing^~dvox:::::::::z" <dvox@hotbot.com> wrote in news:q45eo5$4hi$2@neodomea5yrhcabc.onion:
duckduck sucks, slow as shit, makes you visit "non-javascript" webpage
when not using JS, another slow up. Bad results cannot do advanced
boolean syntax. Crap search engine at least 5 others that are not google
and better than duck.
On 2019-04-19, NUNURBIZ <NUNURBIZ@YAHOO.COM> wrote:
"(p)ing^~dvox:::::::::z" <dvox@hotbot.com> wrote in news:q45eo5$4hi$2@neodomea5yrhcabc.onion:
[354 lines snipped]
duckduck sucks, slow as shit, makes you visit "non-javascript"
webpage when not using JS, another slow up. Bad results cannot do
advanced boolean syntax. Crap search engine at least 5 others that
are not google and better than duck.
Get your delete key fixed, bozo.
On 19 Apr 2019 10:53:15 GMT
Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> wrote:
On 2019-04-19, NUNURBIZ <NUNURBIZ@YAHOO.COM> wrote:
"(p)ing^~dvox:::::::::z" <dvox@hotbot.com> wrote in
news:q45eo5$4hi$2@neodomea5yrhcabc.onion:
[354 lines snipped]
duckduck sucks, slow as shit, makes you visit "non-javascript"
webpage when not using JS, another slow up. Bad results cannot do
advanced boolean syntax. Crap search engine at least 5 others that
are not google and better than duck.
Get your delete key fixed, bozo.
Try wiby.me
On 2019-04-28, tom <tom@0.0.0.0> wrote:
Try wiby.me
Utter shit.
On 2019-04-28, Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> wrote:
On 2019-04-28, tom <tom@0.0.0.0> wrote:
Try wiby.me
Utter shit.
They bill themselves as "search engine for classic websites" which
sounds a bit limited, nostalgic even. It also smacks of hand curation.
| Sysop: | Keyop |
|---|---|
| Location: | Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, UK |
| Users: | 296 |
| Nodes: | 16 (2 / 14) |
| Uptime: | 70:34:54 |
| Calls: | 6,656 |
| Calls today: | 2 |
| Files: | 12,200 |
| Messages: | 5,332,151 |
| Posted today: | 1 |