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DuckDuckGo Donates $300K to Raise the Standard of Trust Online
- AdamSC1 10y agoDisclaimer: I work at DuckDuckGo and this is on our company blog at spreadprivacy.com At DuckDuckGo our overall goal is to raise the standard of trust online. To do that we've focused heavily on search, but try and support organizations that push privacy forward in other ways. For the 7th year in a row, we've announced our donations to organizations and FOSS projects that help keep everyone a little safer in our digital world. Donation Recipients: $100,000 - Freedom of the Press Foundation $75,000 - World Privacy Forum $29,000 - Whisper Systems $25,000 - Privacy Rights Clearinghouse $25,000 - Tor $25,000 - Electronic Frontier Foundation $5000 - American Civil Liberties Union $5000 - Access Now $2500 - The Calyx Institute $2500 - Center for Democracy & Technology $1000 - Restore the Fourth $1000 - Patient Privacy Rights $1000 - Online Trust Alliance $1000 - Tech Freedom $1000 - Demand Progress
- pawadu 10y agoThis is great, thank you for doing this!
- nickpsecurity 10y agoHow does DuckDuckGo make money and, if not confidential, what's revenues?
- trancman 10y agohttps://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates I doubt you could get reliable revenue numbers
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- atmosx 10y agoI love everything about DDG (except Perl :-P ). Stay strong :-)
- rodionos 10y agoI just made a donation to EFF on the back of your announcement. Thanks for bringing this up.
- XJOKOLAT 10y agoFist bump x 1000
- drallison 10y agoKudos to DuckDuckGo for supporting these organizations which are trying to keep everyone a little safer. HN readers who agree should donate to the organization(s) with which they resonate. Even small donations can make important differences.
- mrschwabe 10y agoDDG has been nailing it lately - really digging their Twitter feed too; they do not pull punches.
- aembleton 10y agoI switched a few weeks ago from Google to DDG. I didn't switch because of privacy reasons but because I am now finding their search results superior. That is helped by searching for things that are on Stackoverflow and DDG presenting the answer clearly at the top.
- snackai 10y agoGreat to see support for all those important projects, but maybe DDG should use that money to hire someone who makes their Search Results better so we would not have to go back to Google on every other more sophisticated search.
- ake1 10y agoi too wish ddg had better search results but i think most of what makes google's results better is the tracking...
- ino 10y agoIn my experience, google results are better in incognito.
- icebraining 10y agoThe tracking of everyone else still affects the view in incognito.
- macintux 10y agoYeah, I'm sure two extra employees this year would have made all the difference. They're doing pretty well at an impossible problem. I'm cool with them giving back to the global community.
- rodionos 10y agoThey hired someone in September: http://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/e8635882/13/ http://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/e8635882/13/ At least their traffic acceleration suggests they were able to lift off from the 10 million plateau at around that time.
- MayeulC 10y agoFor what it's worth, I switched to DDG some time ago, and it took some time to get accustomed to, but I know find most of its results to be better than the ones of Google. Maybe except for one search or two that involve special chars, such as an error message. But I'm impressed, overall. Plus, it's not completely unlike Google with the resources it had a few years back.
- berry_sortoro 10y agoAfter serval attempts I really made is this time. DDG is now my default search. Please join us to make the results better, it needs more people searching to get better. I need to use google sometimes because for some terms google is sadly just better.
- thr0waway1239 10y agoIt seems the fastest way to spread privacy is to bring a sudden stop to its erosion. My suggestion: ban all acquisitions by the top software companies for the next 5 years :-) As a bonus, you will foist some competition on the market as companies which thought they were on an acquisition path will now be forced to show real profits.
- mbaltrusitis 10y agoI'm sincerely confused by people saying that DuckDuckGo has vastly inferior search results. Mind you, I search mainly programing related things so maybe DDG better services that niche? What types of searches are people doing that DDG doesn't provide suitable results?
- actionscripted 10y agoLocal or user-specific results; which is sort of the point of DDG. Google has gotten users used to their own search contexts.
- RobertoG 10y agoI agree that Duck search is pretty good. In fact, the only thing I miss from Google is the function "translate:".
- untangle 10y agoThe main thing that I miss is "Last Year." For many topics (e.g., Mac OS issues), I want to eliminate legacy results. But "Last Month" is too tight and sacrifices quality.
- silky 10y ago(I just tried "translate:this" and it didn't do anything, so I'll assume that's not how it's supposed to be used and that it translates something on google translator) The '!gtranslate' bang does that
- AbacusAvenger 10y agoMy success rate with DuckDuckGo searches is noticeably lower than Google. I always search on DuckDuckGo first and then fall back to Google if I can't find what I'm looking for, which is about half the time. So I'm actually confused about why you don't have problems with the search results! So the search quality doesn't keep me attached to it. The main reason I keep using DDG is because of the "bangs" feature: https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang So I can search for "104.20.44.44 !bgp" or things I've used bangs for in recent searches like "ascension kit !nhw", "dark brotherhood !uesp", or "samaxwelladams mass effect !yt" and instantly get what I'm looking for without having to add a bunch of special search engines to my browser.
- JimWestergren 10y agoGreat. I think you should consider Let's Encrypt as well.
- edpichler 10y agoWhen I read the title, I thought immediately on Let´s Encrypt.
- jaryd 10y agoThat's a good point. We actually recently starting using them for internal/dev resources. I'll definitely make a note of it for next year.
- schoen 10y agoFor anyone who wants to donate to directly support Let's Encrypt, its parent entity is Internet Security Research Group, a 501(c)(3) charitable entity. You can make donations to ISRG at https://letsencrypt.org/donate/ https://letsencrypt.org/donate/. Businesses can also become formally recognized sponsors at https://letsencrypt.org/become-a-sponsor/ https://letsencrypt.org/become-a-sponsor/ (though that might not match the giving patterns or preferences of DuckDuckGo). Thanks to DuckDuckGo for all of its donations this year and other years.
- X86BSD 10y agoI've moved all our devices to DDG recently. It used to be goog on all our idevices. Mainly I was just to lazy. But I like DDG results and the engine and that they give back. Also they use FreeBSD which is a plus. Seems like a great company and search engine to me.
- theandrewbailey 10y ago"Our devices"? I don't understand. Do you mean your company's devices? Your family's devices? Your household's devices?
- X86BSD 10y agoFamily.
- technologyvault 10y agoGreat idea, but it seems like it's going to take a lot more than $300k, right?
- ysavir 10y agoVery true. Have you considered donating?
- technologyvault 10y agoMaybe I should. Where do you go to donate?
- jasonkostempski 10y agoDDG has 300K to donate? I guess they're doing much better than I expected. How in the world do they make money?
- nathcd 10y agoAdvertising and affiliate revenue. They show ads based on search terms. https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates
- longsangstan 10y agoThis is what I think when I first saw the title. Is DDG profit making?
- Dirlewanger 10y agoDuckDuckGo most likely tracks everything users do. Their founder sold his previous startup along with all its user's data. Outside of the cozy story they spin, I don't know why users think this company is a champion of user privacy.
- rthomas6 10y agoDo you think they're lying on their privacy policy? Isn't that illegal?
- nilved 10y agoOh no! Not illegal!
- rthomas6 10y agoWhat search engine do you suggest?
- ysavir 10y agoThere's a difference between "tracking everything users do" and "tracking everything each user does". Which are you accusing it of doing?
- Accacin 10y agoIf you're going to make a statement like that, at least offer some proof.
- almost_usual 10y agoI've been using 100% DuckDuckGo in combination with Brave browser for the past 3 months and have not looked back.
- bsclifton 10y agoI just recently (last week) switched over to DDG; it's been solid- I've gotten really great results versus last time I tried them out (5 or 6 months ago?) I love their vision, the services they provide, and what they've done here (with the donations) <3
- twsted 10y agoMore than two years using DDG on every device, very satisfied. I'm suggesting it to everybody.
- joe563323 10y agoThe one thing that is mildly disturbing about DuckDuckGo is its founder did not have privacy in mind while building. In one interview about a couple of years ago he told explicitly that DuckDuckGo became privacy focused because of the market for privacy and not because of his personal belief in privacy.
- anilgulecha 10y agoThat's fine.. If the idealism-based push for privacy isn't doing so well, maybe the business-based push will. We can definitely fight through all available avenues.
- joe563323 10y agoyes. But for that we must be aware of the historical context. I was just biased that some one like RMS (Richard Stallman) who is both capable and strong willed has started the project but surprised to find market drove it. But surely market for privacy got created because of the idealism-based peoples sacrifice.