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Oh look another anonymous question on Quora about a company, answered by the CEO of said company. And it is answered in such a direct way without any marketing

Oh look another anonymous question on Quora about a company, answered by the CEO of said company. And it is answered in such a direct way without any marketing for his service at all. \s These Q&A things on Quora are getting ridiculous. Without all the fluff that thing would condense to one sentence: We make money by context search ads and affiliate commission on !bang searches. The thing that I thought made Google even better (back in the 200xs) was that Google did no advertising for their service. People just recommended their service because it was so useful and good. DDG can't live up to that standard and so they have to highlight their built-in privacy whenever possible. It's like everything they offer, they rub it in your face. It feels like they don't care about the search problem but only about being so much more privacy-focused than Google. I can switch to StartPage and have Google + Privacy, with DDG it is just privacy without any good search results.

RobertDeNiro 8y ago
Quora is garbage. It's full of self-proclaimed experts, who give the impression that their answers are more valuable than those found on other questions/answering sites.
- dna_polymerase 8y ago
  It used to be really useful, in the beginning, when people actually contributed to the platform for the sake of curating knowledge. Now it feels like an advertising platform. Either for companies or "influencer". Posts get artificially prolonged, people add stock images to make people click on the posts.
  - mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
    It’s been a while since I’ve ran across a quora post that wasn’t some form of advertising or follower building. I mostly do “search + Reddit” these days unless I know the topic wont be well covered there if it’s technical in nature. For things like product reviews Reddit has been ok, but not without manipulation by companies too. I guess at the end of the day you always have to read between the lines.
nunobrito 8y ago
Lest we not forget that DDG plainly refuses any external auditors to verify their claims of user privacy, despite having received a large investment recently and employing about 50 people (or more now) in full time. In this case, DDG asks users to have "faith" that their privacy is indeed being respected.
- wslh 8y ago
  Not defending DDG but it is ridiculuos to ask for a company for auditing to probe their claims. There is no legal enforcement for that. If DDG lies and they are discovered they will loose their user base. It is enough with that.
  - dna_polymerase 8y ago
    Yes, but all we can observe for now is that we constantly send the same data to DDG as we did send to Google and for some reason we are supposed to trust DDG. It isn't a too wide far-fetched that DDG could be collecting all data in silence and once they have enough of it (or are big enough to survive losing a part of their user base) start capitalising off of it. I don't trust DDG any more than I do trust Google. In fact I trust Google with their boatloads of great engineers (of which we have learned that they do have some sense of moral and ethics) more than a small company that could easily be forced to capitalise on their user-data because of their shallow pockets.
    - wslh 8y ago
      You can apply the same thinking to zillions of companies marketing themselves. It is unfeasible and naive to promote auditing information. At the end you would be harming small companies who cannot afford auditing.
  - irascible 8y ago
    Found the libertarian...
dmurray 8y ago
It's an interesting question, evidenced by the discussion here. And who could give a more authoritative answer than the CEO? Yeah, maybe it could have been a one-liner instead of a marketing blog post, but you can't have everything.

RobertDeNiro 8y ago

Quora is garbage. It's full of self-proclaimed experts, who give the impression that their answers are more valuable than those found on other questions/answering sites.

dna_polymerase 8y ago
It used to be really useful, in the beginning, when people actually contributed to the platform for the sake of curating knowledge. Now it feels like an advertising platform. Either for companies or "influencer". Posts get artificially prolonged, people add stock images to make people click on the posts.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  It’s been a while since I’ve ran across a quora post that wasn’t some form of advertising or follower building. I mostly do “search + Reddit” these days unless I know the topic wont be well covered there if it’s technical in nature. For things like product reviews Reddit has been ok, but not without manipulation by companies too. I guess at the end of the day you always have to read between the lines.

nunobrito 8y ago

Lest we not forget that DDG plainly refuses any external auditors to verify their claims of user privacy, despite having received a large investment recently and employing about 50 people (or more now) in full time. In this case, DDG asks users to have "faith" that their privacy is indeed being respected.

wslh 8y ago
Not defending DDG but it is ridiculuos to ask for a company for auditing to probe their claims. There is no legal enforcement for that. If DDG lies and they are discovered they will loose their user base. It is enough with that.
- dna_polymerase 8y ago
  Yes, but all we can observe for now is that we constantly send the same data to DDG as we did send to Google and for some reason we are supposed to trust DDG. It isn't a too wide far-fetched that DDG could be collecting all data in silence and once they have enough of it (or are big enough to survive losing a part of their user base) start capitalising off of it. I don't trust DDG any more than I do trust Google. In fact I trust Google with their boatloads of great engineers (of which we have learned that they do have some sense of moral and ethics) more than a small company that could easily be forced to capitalise on their user-data because of their shallow pockets.
  - wslh 8y ago
    You can apply the same thinking to zillions of companies marketing themselves. It is unfeasible and naive to promote auditing information. At the end you would be harming small companies who cannot afford auditing.
- irascible 8y ago
  Found the libertarian...

dmurray 8y ago

It's an interesting question, evidenced by the discussion here. And who could give a more authoritative answer than the CEO? Yeah, maybe it could have been a one-liner instead of a marketing blog post, but you can't have everything.