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For the HN crowd, this may be an option. The general public doesn't really care about privacy, and is not going to use DuckDuckGo or any other service whose pr
by downandout 9y ago
For the HN crowd, this may be an option. The general public doesn't really care about privacy, and is not going to use DuckDuckGo or any other service whose primary selling point is privacy. The best search engine will win the market, and the best search engine will tend to be the one that can generate the most money to invest in its service.
Even if someone comes in and beats Google at some point, they will do it by hiring a massive number of talented people and buying large quantities of data centers and servers. Those things can only be paid for through advertising and tracking, as few people will directly pay for search services. I suppose a socialist/communist government somewhere in the world might have the resources to build a search engine of Google quality that doesn't rely on advertising, but they would have their own hostile agenda - that would be far worse than having to put up with Nike trying to sell you some shoes while you search.
- rapnie 9y agoI got a number of people to switch to DuckDuckGo by sending DDG query url's to them: "Hey, there is a ton of info on this subject!" (sends DDG query)
- Bombthecat 9y agoDDG uses Google. If they grow too big Google will just switch them off..
- kwoff 9y agoExactly why Google needs to be reined in.
- ekovarski 9y agoCurious if there is a source for this; I was just looking at this the other day and couldn't confirm they use Google but they did state that they use over 400 sources. Thx
- amf12 9y agoDDG, in fact, uses Bing. [1][2] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/4lgda4/duckduckgo_is_using_yahoo_for_searches_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/4lgda4/duckduck... [2] https://www.ghacks.net/2016/07/01/duckduckgo-yahoo-partnership/ https://www.ghacks.net/2016/07/01/duckduckgo-yahoo-partnersh...
- sfotm 9y agoSure, I agree that switching email providers or cloud storage services solely for the sake of privacy isn't going to be something that the average person will do. I was just objecting to the sentiment that opening a Google account is a requirement for being productive on the internet.