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Improving DuckDuckGo
- bredren 8y agoGlad to see they built their product-use data tracking tools in house.
- inasring 8y agocould you determine who somebody is by evaluating the decision tree at each split?
- brentadamson 8y agoI run https://jivesearch.com https://jivesearch.com, so I might be biased. The single biggest thing they can do to improve their product is open source everything. They've instead decided to move away from that by freezing their instant answers with no explanation as to if/when they will re-open source them. Makes me question their commitment to privacy and transparency.
- sdinsn 8y agoThey've got to protect their IP somehow.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y agoDo they? Their selling point is trustworthiness and privacy, not the software.
- devwastaken 8y agoAs most business's their internal code is probably a giant ball of mud that runs on caffeine and poor amounts of sleep. It works, but it probably wouldn't be reasonably releasable without refactoring and reworking a lot of the source so that it's componetized in some way. Personally I just want DDG to make a search API that is free and doesn't require API keys. That way I can setup search in mobile or desktop apps and have it automagically be searching through specific sites like Soundcloud and Youtube and such. Like if they're reading this, DDG is very unique and if they were to focus upon reducing costs, making efficient software, and better algorithms, DDG could be the service we shove into apps.
- Kiro 8y agoThat won't happen as every API call to DDG would result in an API call to Bing/Yandex/Yahoo which they have to pay for.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kevinali1 8y agoTheir selling point is trustworthiness, privacy and usefulness. To be useful, they must have quality software/IP. And in their opinion, that should be protected.
- kgraves 8y agoI much rather trust a product that is open source, which makes me slightly uncomfortable and concerned about DDG.
- GordonS 8y agoSo let's say they release their source code - how can they possibly prove that their servers are running that same code?
- enriquto 8y agoat least for some functionalities, you can run it on your computer and observe the same behavior
- gregknicholson 8y agoIf the code was AGPL'd and included contributions for which DDG didn't own the copyright (so DDG would be using the code under the terms of the AGPL), they'd be breaking the licence terms if they failed to disclose any changes. It wouldn't be proof, but it would be a fairly strong commitment.
- type0 8y agoWill they protect my IP somehow?
- pokemongoaway 8y agoInteresting premise... What if they open source some small subset of their code and then track their stock price, usage, and ad revenue as they release more. It could be done in a measured process. I would be more interested in them demonstrating an increasingly distributed, uncoupled, and failure-tolerant infrastructure. I'd like to see them compete with Google's caching too.
- beachwood23 8y agoPersonally, I love that DuckDuckGo gives me a usable alternative to Google that is privacy focused. It might be better if they were open source, but I'll take what I can get from the industry regarding advertising practices at this point.
- cpeterso 8y agoI just DDG and have found !bang shortcuts that are broken or 404 for weeks. I've tried reporting the problems on their feedback forms or Reddit, but never got any responses. If it was open source, I could have submitted a pull request to fix them. I'm surprised they don't have automatic heartbeat queries with expected results for every bang shortcut, at least.
- brentadamson 8y agoI had the same issue with them back when I was a user. If you find any broken !bangs at Jive Search feel free to submit a pull request.
- gregknicholson 8y agoIs there a way to go straight to the first result using Jive Search? With DuckDuckGo searching for "example !" does this. (This is the main reason I don't use Searx.)
- brentadamson 8y agoI've opened up an issue: https://github.com/jivesearch/jivesearch/issues/83 https://github.com/jivesearch/jivesearch/issues/83 I didn't see the "!" documented anywhere but it seems to work at DDG. (We'll also add "\example" to do the same). https://duck.co/help/results/syntax https://duck.co/help/results/syntax
- brentadamson 8y agoJust got done adding it. Let me know if there are any issues.
- h1d 8y agoWon't open sourcing the code make sites get to cheat their ranking by trying to make it rank logic friendly?
- daveFNbuck 8y agoThey could open source everything else. I'm pretty sure they don't do their own ranking anyway.
- brentadamson 8y agoYou can make the ranking configurable. Once we get our own index built we will go back to doing this. The way we used to do it was by having a PostgreSQL function that is customizable once you get everything set up...I'm sure there are other ways to do it as well.
- rvnx 8y agoNo because DDG is a frontend to Bing results. The ads are different (DDG shows Yahoo ads, which also shows Bing ads) and Bing shows Bing ads only.
- phinnaeus 8y agoSource?
- rvnx 8y agoEasy way to verify this, right-click on the ads, paste link
- Kiro 8y agohttps://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources > We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing. They do not have their own search index.
- mrweasel 8y ago
- chme 8y agoI agree. There is also searx: https://github.com/asciimoo/searx https://github.com/asciimoo/searx It has a couple of instances, like: https://searx.me/ https://searx.me/
- moollaza 8y agoHey there, To clarify, we haven't closed anything that was previously open, and all open source Instant Answers will remain open. For now, we've paused community contributions for new Instant Answers and non-essential changes, until we can find a better way to work with the community and their contributions.
- brentadamson 8y agoA better way than open sourcing it?
- ericand 8y agoI wish we had clear/consistent vocabulary for talking about privacy and personal data captured. This seemed pretty clear but it did take a lot of text to explain it and in the end, I still wanted to know if sessions are tagged together such that you can recreate sessions? Can you associate multiple sessions in anyway? You can tell a lot about an individual even if you don't know who they are from information like this.
- agumonkey 8y agoVery nice ideas. I'll stay on ddg
- rudedogg 8y agoOne request I have is to be able to filter results by longer time ranges. If that was added I could switch over.
- lostmsu 8y ago+1. An arbitrary time range would be even better, but I guess there might be technical limitations.
- rocky1138 8y agoI frequently run into this limitation. I really wish there were 3, 6, 9, and 12-month options in the limit dropdown.
- gelatocar 8y agoYeah agreed. As a js dev any search that isn't limited to 1 year is pretty much useless, but 1 month isn't enough.
- patrickbolle 8y agoSeems completely reasonable to me.
- ct0 8y agoProudly using DDG search over the competitor!
- turc1656 8y agoIf anyone from DDG is watching this thread, thank you for your product and your commitment to privacy. As a privacy-conscious individual, I greatly appreciate your work. Is there a way to donate? I know you already monetize your product through ads, but I use an ad-blocker (among other things) because, well, most of the internet does not operate with the same values that you do. Since you aren't making any money off of me, I am willing to donate/pay for your service but cannot find any place on your site to do so.
- erikig 8y agoThey make money off ads (based strictly on the search terms) so they should be just fine. If you'd like to chip, you can donate to the various privacy initiatives they support here: https://www.crowdrise.com/duckduckgoprivacychallenge https://www.crowdrise.com/duckduckgoprivacychallenge (and here) https://duckduckgo.com/donations https://duckduckgo.com/donations
- nashashmi 8y agoWhite list their page.
- FabHK 8y agoOP might prefer to give them money directly rather than seeing ads.
- turc1656 8y agoCorrect. I would definitely prefer to always just pay for services that I use so that 1) I know for sure I am the customer and 2) the service that I value has a stable revenue - ad revenue can be extremely volatile. I don't want the service I like to be at risk because of changes to ad-network pay rates or anything like that.
- ObsoleteNerd 8y agoI vehemently disagree with advertising in general, and go to efforts to make sure myself and my wife/kids see ads as little as possible (Pi-Hole, adblock plugins, no TV other than as a NAS screen, etc). I very much believe it is a form of malicious brainwashing. But, I very much want to reward the people who create the things I use. So I'll never whitelist any site or service, but I'll absolutely donate or make sure they get paid in other ways (and usually willingly donate more than they'd get from showing me ads).
- replies_to_all 8y agoAmazing, how do I invest in this company?
- saagarjha 8y ago> All of these requests are all fully encrypted in transit to DuckDuckGo, such that nobody else but us can see them. And like with all other requests to DuckDuckGo, there is no personally identifiable information embedded in them, and we do not store IP addresses associated with them. They say they don’t Store IPs, but every request presumably has one. So it would be very easy for them to change this if they so wished, at which point their data collection wouldn’t be anonymous. As much as I like DuckDuckGo, I’d really like it if I could trust that they protect my privacy without having to trust them that they are doing so.
- dannyobrien 8y agoIt's hard for Duck Duck Go to deliberately put themselves in a position where they're unable to collect IP addresses. You could, however, use them via their Tor onion service: https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/ https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/ It took me a while to find out somewhere where this is really run by them rather than a third-party proxy, but this seems to confirm it: https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1hdqs6/weve_updated_our_tor_hidden_service_to_work_over/ https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1hdqs6/weve_upd...
- driverdan 8y agoGoal #1 should be high quality search results while respecting privacy. Everything else should be secondary. The biggest thing DDG could do to improve their product is make it quick and easy for users to provide feedback about bad search results. I'd be happy to report searches that Google gives better results for but they don't have a mechanism to do so. For example, search DDG for "odroid". The official domain is hardkernel.com. The first result from hardkernel comes up at #6 for me. I'd love to have a way to suggest the official domain for a product like that so it shows up as #1.
- sdegutis 8y agoValidating that user feedback is legitimate and not from a bad actor sounds pretty hard.
- thaumaturgy 8y agoFWIW in the cases where my DDG results are insufficient (which is happening a lot less often than it used to), I try to just go up and insert a "!g" before the same query. I don't know if DDG is looking at their "!g" requests or not, but I'd be surprised if they weren't.
- pbreit 8y agoAre DDG users comfortable knowing that their search results are always going to be inferior?
- iKenshu 8y agoI really don't think that the results on DDG are inferior, but I'm comfortable with the results. If I want something more personalize or near for my location(Venezuela is not available on DDG) I just go to Google directly or with !g
- pbreit 8y agoSearch is significantly better when it can consider previous search history.
- visualstudio 8y agoDuckDuckGo should start an email service.
- huac 8y agoHow are they going to make money from that?
- RaceWon 8y agoI think someone from say MailChimp would be more qualified to answer this question than I would... :)
- willio58 8y agoThey make money from sending emails to lists. Very different business model to Gmail or the like.
- shmerl 8y agoCharge a monthly / yearly fee?
- huac 8y agoif you are willing to pay for private email, why not any of the dozens of existing ones? e.g. protonmail or fast mail? there is little differentiation available for them here.
- craftyguy 8y agoThe same way that other legitimate email service providers do: they charge a monthly or yearly fee for service.
- singularity2001 8y agoIf anyone from DDG is watching this thread, please stop "auto-correcting" my queries!!!!! "you" "know" what I mean
- mrweasel 8y agoGoogle does the same thing, and it even leaves out words if it believe that is won't give you (enough?) results. But I agree, it's rare that auto-correcting helps me, more often than not it changes my search to something wrong.
- esturk 8y agoWhile we have a duckduckgo thread going, does anyone know when duckduckhack is coming back?
- 100-xyz 8y agoI used to use duckduckgo and liked it, till the Chinese government blocked it to protect me from the evils of the internet :-)
- wpdev_63 8y agoI love duckduckgo and I feel I can almost replace google completely with it. I only have the following comments on it. 1. They're hosted in the US. I wish the company would pick up and move to a country not within the 14 eyes and out of jurisdiction of the cyber super powers(US, China, and Russia). Maybe panama? At least move it virtually with a warrant canary in place. 2. The search results need better contrasting colors for glancing through. Google is noticeable better with it's bolder fonts and better typeface/colors. I feel this would be easy place to innovate in over google. 3. Better site specific searches. Right now you can search a specific site for results. For example right now you can search specific sites using `site:ycombinator.com rust programming langugage` and you will only get results from hackernews. It works great right now and I use daily in my workflows but it would be great to do this from the search bar for firefox or some better way. Search engines have _alot_ of areas they can innovate in and I feel google with all its controversy(prism program, chinese state surveillance, etc) that many people would prefer to have their searches(and their life stories) in a company that values their users privacy to a fanatical extent.
- snazz 8y agoFor your second concern, did you know that you can change the colors and fonts on DDG from its settings? Once you do, it provides a couple of methods to sync it to each of your devices.
- andimm 8y agoabout 3: I have set DDG as default search engine and I can just type "site:ycombinator.com rust programming langugage" in the address bar and get the results from ycombinator only. Also lots of sites have !bangs available, like "!hackernews rust programming langugage" will go the the HN search directly. https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang Maybe that helps.
- bernardlunn 8y agoI love “private by design”. It was easy to switch and results are good enough. As a publisher I do NOT like the cash donations model - too feudal for me.. I think donating time to improve product - as they are asking - makes more sense. Not sure I see value in them open sourcing their software. In short, I think DDG is great and should keep doing more of what they do.
- jordache 8y agoi tried to change google to duckduckgo. it was not sustainable. immediately noticeable poor search results. Searching an address brings me to a subpar open map site,
- zapzupnz 8y agoI don't know why you're being downvoted, because your experience is as valid as anybody else's. I'm with you, I can't switch to DDG because my productivity tanks with the poorer results than Google. I tried Startpage as a sort of in-between solution, but that site's so dang slow.
- craftyguy 8y ago> I don't know why you're being downvoted HN users use the downvote to show disagreement. Ideally it would only be used to bury comments that were off topic, spam, etc, but the only system I've seen with a correct implementation of this is https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs. Edit: This comment is a case in point since I've been downvoted less than 30 seconds after posting it. Ha. I challenge someone to prove me wrong.
- dna_polymerase 8y ago> To be clear, this means we cannot ever tell what individual people are doing since everyone is anonymous Nope. This means that they tell us that they cannot tell what individual people are doing. But as they said right in the sentence before that, we are supposed to believe that they don't store IP addresses. > And like with all other requests to DuckDuckGo, there is no personally identifiable information embedded in them, and we do not store IP addresses associated with them. That is an outright lie even. HTTP Headers contain enough data already to make individuals distinguishable. Add some data science and you got some fancy profiles of your users. I don't know what's going on with HN and DDG, but seriously is everyone just buying into this marketing bs? Why should I trust DDG with their claims about privacy instead of Google, Bing, or any other company?
- sbhn 8y agoDDG sells your attention, just like all of them. It’s nothing about privacy, or selling your profile. You search a term, you get ads. When they say ‘We don’t sell your data’, it is a distraction, they are selling your immediate attention. DDG is part of the yahoo-Microsoft search alliance. To advertise on DDG, use Bing Ads.
- musaffa 8y agoI'm waiting for DDG to integrate dates in the search results. Date is crucial to understand how new or old the content is. This is one of the reasons why I'm not using it.
- netclockin 8y agothanks ddg for improving user experience and privacy unlike other search engines. No wonder folks are not only blocking but using things like adnauseam - https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam
- throwawaymanbot 8y agoHow about you not have a relationship with Yandex? Since Russia is ...well.. you know..
- nojvek 8y agoI would buy a router with Adblock filters enabled.