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DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo
- AndrewWarner 10y agoDoes this mean that Yahoo results appear in DDG? Will DDG power Yahoo search in any way?
- frank_jaeger 10y agoFrom the "technical implementation" article they link to >When you do a search on DuckDuckGo, depending on the particular search, we will make a call to Yahoo for links, ads and other content.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Kiro 10y agoWhat would they power Yahoo with? DDG has always just shown Yahoo results (which in turn comes from Bing).
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago>DDG has always just shown Yahoo results // Pretty sure that's not true. DDG used to do its own indexing IIRC. Early on in the project we used to get regular updates here.
- b34r 10y agoIs this actual Yahoo tech or Bing result enrichment by way of Yahoo?
- yeukhon 10y agoI heard Yahoo has a search team but I don't know exactly if they were just enhancing on top of Bing really.
- Dr_tldr 10y agoYahoo, the company that saves your unsent and deleted email drafts forever and will turn them over to law enforcement even though they say that should be impossible? http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-deleted-yahoo-emails-led-to-a-20-year-drug-trafficking-conviction http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-deleted-yahoo-emails-le... Maybe Yahoo is sincere in their privacy pledge, maybe they're not, but one thing has already been proven: they don't have a good enough grasp of how their own servers work to make that promise. Very disappointed in DuckDuckGo. I expect they won't be around for too much longer, much like Yahoo.
- rmason 10y agoI do sure hope that any agreement DDG has made with Yahoo doesn't get cancelled by their eventual new owner. But if Dan Gilbert ends up being the buyer my guess is that he'd actually like Gabriel Weinberg enough to continue. Not so much with Verizon or the private equity firms bidding.
- tacos 10y agoAnd so it ends. The mere act of partnering with Yahoo indicates desperation and signals poor decision making. I'm not sure I understand HN's fascination with this site but this is not a good sign for those who claim to use it in these never-ending threads.
- beardog 10y agoHow? its all proxied and the 'yahoo server' is duckduckgo owned.
- organic_tech34 10y agoPrivacy Statements are the tech equivalent of calling food organic. You need a reputable third party to audit your practices. Or your software needs to be open source so anyone can see what you're doing. I'll be switching from using DDG because of this. I don't trust Yahoo, and I barely trust DDG.
- dcgoss 10y agoIronically, your name is organic_tech34. For the record, the term "organic" is regulated by the USDA.
- Zezima 10y agothatsthejoke.jpg
- mathgeek 10y ago> the term "organic" is regulated by the USDA. I think the point the previous poster was making is that even though it's regulated, there are so many black boxes that it's rather easy to sneak in a violation and no one notices (whether the company is doing it or it's accidental). Just look at how many organic product recalls happen in any given year due to various causes.
- dcgoss 10y agoOk, that makes sense.
- chroma 10y agoYou seem to have very high standards for privacy. So I'm curious: If DDG doesn't pass muster, what search engine will you be switching to?
- yclept 10y agoWhat are you switching to? As far as I know ddg and yahoo are basically just bing already. So what is an alternative you are comfortable with?
- ra1n85 10y agoAlways loved DuckDuckgo - kinda came across as a search engine that didn't seek to takeover the world, and only sought to fill a (necessary) niche. That seems more genuine than "don't be evil".
- Zikes 10y agoGoogle originally won everyone over with superior results, the rest of it came pretty organically. The underdog is always everyone's favorite until they somehow wind up on top.
- GauntletWizard 10y agoThere's some truth to the pattern, though; Once you're no longer the underdog, those seeking power will seek you out, and it's hard to prevent infiltration by the power-hungry.
- latj 10y agoGood things dont scale. Sergey Brin & Larry Page could have been the old Japanese man in the subway station sushi joint making the the best bites of a lifetime for a few hundred humans a day. They decided to go a different route.
- SwellJoe 10y agoI don't think I follow. A good web search engine cannot be a niche product with a few users. The bigger the resources, the better the results. That's an impossible problem to overcome by merely being really good at something. DDG overcomes it, reasonably effectively, by getting results from a huge list of partners. If there weren't huge companies offering search APIs, DDG simply couldn't compete with Google (without massive scale of their own). As it is, DDG still provides somewhat weaker results in some cases; it is still my primary search engine on all of my devices, and I like it, but when I'm frustrated by the results, I make use of !g and usually find what I'm looking for.
- pwnna 10y agoI think a better link to explain is here: https://duck.co/help/results/yahoo-technical-implementation https://duck.co/help/results/yahoo-technical-implementation It looks like they are just querying yahoo for results and ads as a proxy and it sounds like, through some contractual/technical limitations, they have to make that request from a yahoo controlled domain name (duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net). However, they say they fully control the server and yahoo does not get to touch it, as yahoo delegated DNS to them. The change does not seem malicious and if what they say is true, then the implementation might not be too bad. The volume of traffic they get probably means you cannot profile an individual from Yahoo's side. However, this potentially means that your search history is leaked to Yahoo, albeit in an aggregate manner with other DDG users, which may have attacks that I'm not aware of. What I can see, however, is a lot of noscript users get startled by this change as they will see DDG use a script from yahoo.net (actually duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net) as by default noscript does not show the full domain.
- robszumski 10y agoSo they data mine this traffic at the nameserver level, just to reasonably say that DDG doesn't share info? Making it technically your computer sharing the info, by way of their forced implementation? Seems like the ad blockers are making the right move here.
- jsmthrowaway 10y agoThis comment is puzzling, since authoritative nameservers only see actual end-user traffic on an occasional basis given the cornucopia of resolver caches in near-unanimous use (as well as the fat TTL on the yahoo.net side of the delegation). This denies Yahoo! the reliable data that you seem to think they've successfully pulled over on everyone, at least if I understand your comment correctly which I'll admit I'm having a hard time doing. It's also an odd concern given that most everybody these days uses Google or their ISP's resolvers which would be far more interesting "nameserver level data mining." (I have a hard time believing Google successfully logs that traffic in detail, however.)
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- cft 10y agoSorry could not abstain Two turkeys do not make an eagle
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- 0xmohit 10y agoFor the record, this isn't really news. A lot of details can be found at https://duck.co/help/results/yahoo-technical-implementation https://duck.co/help/results/yahoo-technical-implementation https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources also states that they partner with Yahoo!, and in some regions and scenarios, Yandex and Bing.
- ausvisaissues 10y agoDifferent topic: Why do they use www.duck.co as their development url and www.duckduckgo.com as their search engine name? The latter is just way too long to type. Especially for casual users who has google set at their main search engine. Compare URL lengths: duckduckgo.com 14 (10+4) google.com 10 (6+4) yahoo.com 9 (5+4) yandex.ru 9 (6+3) bing.com 8 (4+4) baidu.cn 8 (5+3) I really want to like duckduckgo, but the name is really not well chosen. Even google (with a relatively long name) at least have two repeating characters.
- nitrogen 10y agoThere's ddg.gg, but I don't know if that's an official domain and it's not necessarily easier to remember.
- type0 10y agoDuckDuckGo is to long and ddg.gg url is kinda makes it disservice. It instantly gets labeled as "nerd-stuff" if you recommend it to some non-techy friend, you just know they never going to even try it.
- re 10y agoddg.gg 6 (3+3) https://duck.co/help/company/short-domain https://duck.co/help/company/short-domain
- ausvisaissues 10y agoThanks, that was what I was looking for. It should be the default url.
- jeemar 10y agoWow, what are our options now?! Also, Yahoo now has information about general searches made by DDG users even if they can't get info on a particular individual.
- shmerl 10y agoGreat! Missing date filtering was a major downside.
- HoopleHead 10y agoI switched to using StartPage[1] a while back, because I got sick of waiting for DDG to add date-filtering. I've kind of got used to StartPage now, so not sure if I'll switch back... although some of DDG's 'bangs' were handy. [1]https://startpage.com https://startpage.com
- lnalx 10y agoDDG has now date filter support.
- SwellJoe 10y agoI've been astounded at how rare it is for a search API to offer date information. I talked to Gabriel about the problem many moons ago, and even with their significantly greater clout (than a random dude working on a tiny project that uses search engine APIs), and despite asking for it, they couldn't get that info from their partners. So, it's good to see they finally made it happen with Yahoo. But, I thought the Yahoo BOSS search API was gone, and the only way to use Yahoo search was basically just a black box sort of deal (i.e., you pass them the query and they hand you results, which you display as yahoo sent them). I'm not sure I understand what DDG is doing, and when you'd hit those Yahoo results. It's especially convoluted since Yahoo gets its results from Bing, right?
- piplgobde 10y agoYeah been seeing the Yahoo logo on the bottom right of my DDG results, for a couple weeks now. Not going to be moving away because of this, we'll see if it gets even better.
- greglindahl 10y agoI'm still getting Yandex, guess Gabe's algo suspects I'm not much of an ad clicker :-)
- piplgobde 10y agoWhich is funny since I have changed my hosts file and use uBlock Origin and extensions like that for anything that might have missed.
- techthroway443 10y agoSame here. How new is this 'news'?
- MichaelGG 10y agoI want to use DDG. I've made it my default search engine. But the result page is just so slow. Both in slow to load (v Google), and actual responsiveness. It's just slightly laggy, or at least it feels like that. Google has neither problem. I'm willing to put up with not-excellent relevancy, but the slowness is killing me. I'm using FF 49 64-bit on Win8. Am I anomalous or does anyone else feel this at all?
- ben-en 10y agoI generally have no problems with it. I've tried FF/Chrome on Win8/10 and Arch. The load time might be marginally slower than google but the UI is fine.
- enibundo 10y agoNo slowness here. The only downside is the quality of results. Most of the time when searaching technical questions I get better results on google compared to ddg. It looks like ddg doesn't like stackoverflow.
- Doctor_Fegg 10y agoAgreed: underranking SO is my biggest issue with DDG.
- q-base 10y agoWhich of course depending on their ranking implementation seems kinda odd, as you could expect a big part of the users of SO also to be the ones using DDG. But again if it categorically undervalues results from there, then those users will of course find alternatives.
- StavrosK 10y agoThis is what I've noticed as well. Searching for Rust programming questions is very hard with DDG, whereas Google gets relevant results at the top. Otherwise, DDG and Google are pretty much on par.
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- frik 10y agoDDG is a meta search engine that uses mainly Yahoo and/or Yandex (depending on the region). Yahoo had turned their Yahoo BOSSS API (acccess to Bing search engine) from free to pay-for-each-1000-queries and completely discontinued the API earlier this year. So now we learn DDG gets access, but no one else of the smaller fishes (other meta search engines, etc).
- yitchelle 10y agoFor the layman like me: if I do a search for "cute cats", does the results comes from Bing after it has been through Yahoo before DDG shows it? Who does the actual searching?
- chflags 10y agoWhy do they say "duckduckgo-owned"? It appears they are using AWS. Who really owns the server? echo 50.18.192.251 duckduckgo.com >> /etc/hosts Avoids needless DNS lookups; saves DNS logs from your footprints.
- jlgaddis 10y ago... and will break as soon as that instance is shut down.
- chflags 10y agoThat's why I'd prefer a search engine that was not using AWS, or Yahoo. Too many needless dependencies. Out of curiousity I'm starting a counter today. Will post something when this IP addr fails. Feel free to take a guess how long it will be used by DDG. And when it does change, if ever, I have a one line shell script that uses ed to remove entries from files, so all it takes to add a new IP addr to HOSTS is typing ed-script-name domain-name /etc/hosts echo aa.bb.cc.dd domain-name >> /etc/hosts In my opinion, the usefulness of a website is inversely proportional to the frequency with which it changes IP addresses. For example, the IP address for HN rarely changes. But feel free to keep looking it up in DNS every day. Just in case. If there are problems with DNS, most users will probably not remember the IP address for HN and will not be able to read the stories. Meanwhile, the user that stores IP addresses as a backup will have no such problems.
- basicplus2 10y agoi noticed a slow down sometime ago... did Duckduckgo slow down when/because yahoo got involved?
- pbreit 10y ago"We've worked closely with Yahoo to implement these new features in accordance with contractual terms and our privacy policy. To be as transparent as possible, we've written up details on the technical implementation." As a search user, I couldn't care less about this stuff. I don't think it's even possible to build a good search engine "in accordance with contractual terms".
- akerro 10y agoMotto of DDG was "Still better than Yahoo" ; )
- dredmorbius 10y agoFor those who'd been missing date-restricted searches, DDG now offers these, thanks to the Yahoo partnership. It's not as flexible as Google's date-ranged searches, in which specific start and end dates can be specified, but you now can restrict searches to the past day, week, month, or year. I'd noticed this (and submitted to HN) about a month back. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11819435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11819435 (The control's moved to the Hamburger Menu since.) (I'm hoping more controls come into effect.)
- Sami_Lehtinen 10y agoYet another Privacy Oriented Search Engine: Oscobo https://oscobo.co.uk https://oscobo.co.uk
- vmateixeira 10y agoNot so bad results, although a bit slow.
- justsearchin 10y agoOscobo is a Yahoo partner. It is Motherpipe.com, so similar setup as DDG, but without the "owned" server in between.
- rodionos 10y agoIf you look at their search statistics, they've been growing slower this year. https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/e8635882/7/ https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/e8635882/7/
- cpplinuxdude 10y agoPlease help me understand why DuckDuckGo decided for the query to go in the URL, as opposed to being encrypted on the client before being sent to the server as a get or a post. Most users probably have their browsing history switched on, and synced with their friendly browsing software provider anyway, totally reversing any privacy advantage a user might potentialy gain by using DuckDuckGo.
- SparkyMcUnicorn 10y agoThey do have an option to turn on POST instead of GET. This is from their page on privacy ( https://duckduckgo.com/privacy https://duckduckgo.com/privacy ): > Another way to prevent search leakage is by using something called a POST request, which has the effect of not showing your search in your browser, and, as a consequence, does not send it to other sites. You can turn on POST requests on our settings page, but it has its own issues. POST requests usually break browser back buttons, and they make it impossible for you to easily share your search by copying and pasting it out of your Web browser's address bar.
- elcapitan 10y agoDuckDuckGo should wait a little longer and then buy Yahoo.
- Ferver777 10y agoInteresting. Probably won't do a ton though for their bottom line.
- appleflaxen 10y agoI don't have any technical concerns about this, because I trust DDG based on their actions to date. But TBH it does tarnish their brand a bit, in my eyes, and I don't fully understand why this is a big enough improvement to dilute the brand at all.
- youdontknowtho 10y agoThat's great. Anything that sees more competition in the search space is good for the Internet.
- mgav 10y agoIn most cases I'd worry, but I think Gabriel is trustworthy and long-term focused.