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Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)
- arcticwombat 8y agoAll hail the duck! (Not tongue in cheek. I'm a fan of the duck)
- dymk 8y agoHow does DuckDuckGo make money?
- wyldfire 8y ago[Untracked] Advertisers. See [1]. [1] https://i0.wp.com/fourweekmba.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/duckduckgos-business-model.jpg?w=2308&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/fourweekmba.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02...
- somerandoguy 8y agohttps://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates
- fisian 8y agoThe ddg CEO (and others) have answered this question here: https://www.quora.com/How-does-DuckDuckGo-make-money https://www.quora.com/How-does-DuckDuckGo-make-money tl;dr: They serve ads based on keywords and not by tracking your interests.
- thecatspaw 8y agoSo how does this fit into it?
- btian 8y agoHow does what fit into what? It's possible to serve ads without being creepy if that's what you're asking.
- thecatspaw 8y agoNo, I meant how does this extention/mobile browser generate money for them?
- abootstrapper 8y agoMarketing.
- btian 8y agoIt's marketing for their search engine
- r3bl 8y agoIt offers ads based on your search term, not your browsing history.
- KangLi 8y agoI have been using it for the last month, thanks to HN, but also those who contribute. :D
- dgzl 8y agoDDG has been my default search in FF for a very long time now. If I can't find what I'm looking for with ddg, I'll simply add !g to my search, and it will redirect to Google.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- chucksmash 8y agoAlso available at https://duck.com https://duck.com now, after much ado.
- sasoon 8y agoWhy are they redirecting it to duckduckgo.com, why not just use duck.com? Short and simple.
- asadlionpk 8y agothey only recently acquired that domain. That too from google!
- amdelamar 8y agoAlso available at https://ddg.gg https://ddg.gg Even shorter to type. ;)
- pixelbreaker 8y agoI first tried DDG in its early years and it just didn't yield the results I needed, I tried it again a couple of years ago and have stuck with it ever since as it has must better results these days.
- jb3689 8y agoTotally agree. Had a similar experience as well and then tried again a few months ago and am happy. I do still need to jump over to Le Goog for some searches though. The UI supports a good amount of tweaking which was helpful for getting me used to the switch too
- pixxel 8y ago!g search term
- vanadium 8y ago!s = Startpage, anonymizing by proxy the Google SERPs. I know, I'm having to retrain my DDG Bang muscle memory myself.
- pixxel 8y agoOh! Many thanks :)
- owaty 8y agoDo they have a contract with google? Or how do they get around captchas and cease and desists?
- vanadium 8y ago"Startpage acts as an intermediary between you and Google, so your searches are completely private. Startpage submits your query to Google anonymously, then returns Google results to you privately. Google never sees you and does not know who made the request; they only see Startpage." From: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/158/22/what-is-the-relationship-between-startpage-and-google https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic... More: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/List/Index/22/google https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/List/...
- maewsa 8y agoDoes this offer anything unique that other content blockers cannot? From what I can see it would only be the forced encryption and I guess the letter grade. I love DDG for search but not sure this browser competes with 1Blocker X Safari integration on iOS.
- sp332 8y agoIt's not a content blocker. It does have a lot of "instant answers" with information put in a box next to search results so you don't even have to click through. e.g. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=who+is+the+prime+minister+of+malaysia https://duckduckgo.com/?q=who+is+the+prime+minister+of+malay... Also it has "bangs" which give you shortcuts to lots of other services. https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
- maewsa 8y agoGuess I worded it a bit strangely but this acts like a content blocker on iOS, but in it's own browser. Most commenters are just commenting on the search engine but this post is about their mobile browser. I was just curious what benefits you get from switching to this browser vs. using a content blocker with Safari.
- webmobdev 8y agoWhy would I use another AMERICAN / Western search engine? I personally feel we would be better off using Yandex (Russian) or Baidu (Chinese) search engines. We need more COMPETITION to reduce our reliance on parasites like Google / Microsoft / FB etc and thus force the industry to reevaluate their business model on how they make money from us. Yandex has a pretty decent search engine, and also helpfully provides a link to Google / Bing too, in case one isn't satisfied with their search results. This is smart of them as they still get data to improve their search engine, but also don't leave their users disgruntled when the search results aren't relevant.
- x775 8y agoThe main reason, I suspect, many, including myself, opt for using DuckDuckGo is because people have started to care about privacy; not because they necessarily wish to help foster competition. I see fostering competition as a nice, natural byproduct of valuing privacy.
- bad_user 8y agoI agree about being mindful about using services of US companies, possibly preferring alternatives, however using a Chinese or a Russian alternative instead is just plain stupid. Two reasons: 1. The US is a functional democracy, with a bill of rights and privacy laws which aren’t perfect, but exist; California even has its own version of the GDPR 2. They have strong trade agreements with the EU and if you’re an EU citizen this matters, as companies found to violate the GDPR will get screwed; GDPR which also makes the export of data very complicated, so US companies are increasingly keeping EU data on EU servers Speaking as an EU citizen, the NSA is not my enemy. But companies like Facebook are. So for me a company like DuckDuckGo is still acceptable because without privacy, they offer nothing of interest, so they won’t do anything to jeopardize their reputation. Speaking of which, DuckDuckGo can exist in the US, but not in China or in Russia, both being jurisdictions that are ... challenging, to say the least. If you insist on not using US services, then the only alternatives worth looking at are in Europe, because we have strong privacy laws and we aren’t being led by dictators. And you’d better not look at a “five eyes country” ;-) Here’s one: https://www.qwant.com/ https://www.qwant.com/
- romanovtexas 8y agoWhy is this suddenly on the front page?
- gerash 8y agoI can't tell if these posts are astroturfed or not. Every other day there's a top post on HN to use DDG (which is mostly a wrapper over Bing) as the default search.
- extropy 8y agoThis is a Browser from DDG, not their search engine. It claims to block trackers like Google and FB, and provides other privacy related features. Does not say what it's built on... Probably chromium.
- ickler9 8y agolol I know right, same with Brave.
- jjordan 8y agoSwitched to DDG for my defaults over a year ago now. Still occasionally have to append a !g to my search, and Google Maps is still unmatched, but for run of the mill searches it's been working out. Google lost my trust, so if I can avoid using a service of theirs with a viable alternative, I do so. Go, OpenStreetMap!!
- jeherr 8y agoI’ve switched over recently too. I’m slowly removing Google from my life as much as I reasonably can. The one thing I can’t find an alternative for is Google Scholar. I’ve never found another half decent search engine for research journals. The fact that I can get references formatted pretty consistently for BibTeX right from Google Scholar is a big plus.
- mattlondon 8y agoSame situation here - the vast majority of my day-to-day searching has been handled by DDG for the past few years without any issues apart from the odd !g search for really specific things (that google is not much better for either).
- saagarjha 8y ago> Go, OpenStreetMap!! Didn’t DuckDuckGo switch off of OpenStreetMap to Apple Maps recently?
- DavideNL 8y ago
- Kiro 8y agoAs usual most of the comments here are "I made the switch and couldn't be happier" and have nothing to do with the actual submission. Therefore I feel obligated to post my usual rant about DDG just being a wrapper for Bing.
- chappi42 8y agoBing or not. For me important is that it is outside Google's reach. This prevents aggregating search (history) with e.g. gmail, contacts, location etc. Also important is, that DDG now works reasonably good in most cases.
- Kiro 8y agoThank you. I support that. What I don't support is people saying it's a false claim when DDG is completely transparent about it themselves.
- FabHK 8y agoDoes Bing offer the same privacy advantages (no tracking, no history based ads, etc.)? EDIT to add: I think nobody disputes or cares that most results come from (or equal) Bing results, as long as they're good enough.
- johnmarcus 8y agoDDG basically acts as a vpn proxy. Bing sees all the traffic as from DDG the same, they can't differentiate the individual requesters. Assuming DDG does what it says it does anyway.
- FabHK 8y agoRight, so that's a valuable service in itself, as far as I'm concerned.
- puzzle 8y agoThe most peculiar thing about building on top of Bing's index, when it comes to privacy, is that Bing itself was caught looking at the queries and clicks of Google users during the "hiybbprqag" affaire. It was quite telling that Microsoft didn't turn that off even after getting outed.
- lota-putty 8y agosearx anyone?
- the_other_guy 8y agoDDG has the most aggressive and adversarial marketing by an internet company I've ever seen that's only matched in intensity by Brave browser's company. Is Gabriel trying to sell before the end of the business cycle?
- nullserver 8y agoI misread this as improve your piracy. I was quite disappointed
- ctnb 8y agoI'm glad most a lot of these comments are saying DDG works for them; I still have a lot of issues with the search quality and switched to Startpage a while ago which uses anonymized google results.
- arcticwombat 8y agoFor me it works well about 90% of the time, when it doesn't I hop over to Google for those specific queries.
- parthdesai 8y agoI'm with you. I switched to DDG, and within a day i started subconsciously adding `!g` to my query. And it's for simple things, not even complicated programming queries. For example, if i wanna see what the weather is, typing "Toronto weather" in google gives me the current weather right on the front page, whereas with DDG, i have to scan for weather network and click on it to actually get the information. Same goes for a TV show/movie/sports score. Google has Imdb rating/current live score right there on the home page.
- blueblob 8y ago"toronto weather" gives me the weather now and the 7 day forecast in a widget on the top of the search page. If I search "packers" it gives me the latest packers scores on the top (and if a game is ongoing an indicator of the time, who has the ball, and the score), if I search "patriots", there is an nfl tab on the top that I can click and it gives me the scores. I'm not saying you're wrong, but DDG has been working on some of those issues. You can always add !imdb or !rt in front of your shows/movies for rottentomatoes or imdb.
- parthdesai 8y agoHmm, you are right it shows correct weather now. But here[0] are the examples of sport and movies/tv shows that i was talking about. [0] https://imgur.com/a/vBWh6rN https://imgur.com/a/vBWh6rN
- 8y ago
- MYEUHD 8y agoIf you're looking for privacy, you shouldn't use DDG as it's based in the US. Consider searx or startpage instead
- hhanesand 8y agoWhat’s so bad about being based in the US?
- egwynn 8y agoMight just be that US companies are known to be subject to National Security Letters
- briandear 8y agoFor the average user doing average things, how is a NSL worth worrying about? If you are on that radar, you have bigger problems than your search engine.
- KeepFlying 8y agoI think the concern is the breadth of information that the NSA has been known to gather. This is all speculation (though informed by the Snowden revelations), but if the NSA asks DDG for data for some legitimate reason, it is likely that the NSA would just demand "all" the data, and not a scoped version of it. Meaning your information could get caught up in it. I agree that for most people this may not be a concern, but if you would like to learn more, privacytools.io has some more information about the "14 Eyes" and other nation state information gathering efforts.
- bluGill 8y agoNot really a worry because they cant get what ddg doesn't have.
- solarkraft 8y agoIs there even evidence they don't keep anything? Edit: Okay, you can't really have evidence of absence, but good reasons to believe they don't log?
- zokula 8y agoStartpage.com is better and has better privacy and search results
- ForHackernews 8y agoYou can use !sp from DDG.
- przmk 8y agoOr just !s :)
- xwvvvvwx 8y agoWhy do you think startpage has better privacy?
- strittmatter 8y agoTheir search results are not relevant enough for me, unless I know exactly what I need (for example searching the brand name) I usually can't find what I am looking for. I hate to admit it but Google seems to be much more friendly when it comes to search queries in common english, "What is the best lunch spot in city-name?" Until DDG can provide better results I don't see a mass migration, even with all of Google's privacy problems.
- ryanelfman 8y agoI love DDG! Switched to it about a year ago and haven't looked back. The odd time I need to use Google at work for a specific technical lookup but otherwise I don't need too. I love to support the underdog who values privacy. I recommend it to everyone.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- leokennis 8y agoSwitched to DDG about two years ago. First, it was worse than Google. However in the meantime, DDG has improved a bit and Google got worse, showing a lot of performance devrading crap/boxes/large text instead of search results. So DDG is now all around the better choice.
- iwakura 8y ago>improve your privacy by downloading another app I don't see how piling even more technology onto privacy unfriendly internet habits helps. You're not going to get more privacy by using this on a site like Facebook. The real solution is to simply remove them from your life. See if there's something you can remove to improve the situation first instead of adding stuff.
- benkarst 8y agoI tried. No maps.
- johnmarcus 8y agotry again. they just incorporated apple maps
- tombert 8y agoI love DDG (and have been using it as my primary search engine for about six months) but I feel like the hacker community (including me) forgets that DDG is a for-profit corporation, and that at some level posting these kinds of links is more or less the same as just giving them free advertising.
- syrrim 8y agoThe quality of DDGs results is related in part to the number of users they have: - they use link clicks to determine coherence between query and result. More users => more clicks => greater coherence - they fund themselves using advertising, so their revenue is roughly proportional to their number of users. Increasing users => increasing money => more money to devote towards improving results If one is interested in improving the results of DDG, then providing them with free advertising is an easy way to do it.
- tombert 8y agoI'm not disagreeing with your point (or the network effect in general), but I guess I worry that if we don't engage in some early skepticism, we're going to end up with another Google or Facebook on our hands.
- Kiro 8y ago> they use link clicks to determine coherence between query and result. More users => more clicks => greater coherence Do you have a source on that?
- jressey 8y agoGiving DDG free advertising is something I try to do once a day. I believe DDG is the rare ethical business and deserves praise.
- x220 8y agoSo the implication here is that if Google bad, Google company, DuckDuckGo company, then DuckDuckDuckGo bad too?
- 8y ago
- gortok 8y agoMissing features I wish DuckDuckGo had (and reasons why I manually type google.com even though I have DDG set as my default browser: - sports searches. If I search for “Washington Capitals”, I want to know when they’re playing next and what channel it’s on, as well as the results of their past game. This goes for any time I search for a sports team. - searches for dictionary terms should one-box the definition (for instance, today I looked up mortified with “mortified definition”). I should see the one-box of what I’m looking for. - one-boxing in general: stack overflow answers, definitions, calculations (feet to meters, grams to pounds, etc), sports, time zones, cities, monuments, etc. The search results from DDG just feel “off” compared to google search. I want to like DDG and I keep attempting to use it; but it’s failing at making relevant information immediately available at my fingertips.
- Zizizizz 8y agoyou don't have to do the full URL just type "!g Washington capitals"
- floatingatoll 8y agoIf you're willing, consider using the 'Send Feedback' link in the lower right corner of the DDG results page to inform them when you were 'reaching' for a given helper-box and didn't get what you were hoping for.
- rb808 8y agoI use bing. I dont really mind that someone is monitoring my searches and tracking my usage. I just dont want Google to dominate, so hopefully using bing helps to balance the world.
- jialutu 8y agoI've stopped using Google and moved to DDG not because of privacy, but because the results on Google just seem the same everytime even when I use different wording, making it feel like Google has been becoming a "recommendation engine" rather than a "search engine".
- DecayingOrganic 8y agoIf you feel like Google is excluding certain keywords you very much like to include, you can wrap the word/sentence in double quotes, this tells Google to show results that certainly include these keywords. For example, searching: "word x" "sentence a" would prompt Google to show only pages that include both the word and the sentence in the same page.
- JetSpiegel 8y agoIf only. It's a bit more fuzzy than that now.
- foxfired 8y agoI deliberately look for DNT (do not track) header and don't load any analytics for those users. As far as I can tell, the ddg app does not send those headers, which could be helpful.
- LawoftheHarvest 8y agoFor highly useful, tested bangs, check out Duck Go Bang: http://duckgobang.com http://duckgobang.com My favorite is probably !pf since I use it so much.
- dang 8y agoWe changed the URL from https://duckduckgo.com/app https://duckduckgo.com/app to the page that explains what that app does.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- 3xblah 8y agoIf the user submits a GET request to DDG from the commandline with Javascript disabled, then all results links are prefixed with the address of a DDG server, e.g., https://example.com https://example.com becomes https://duckduckgo.com/l/uddg=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com https://duckduckgo.com/l/uddg=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com Whatever the reasons may be for this decision, it allows DDG to track all links that the user follows from the results page. That is no better than Google. It is not a privacy improvement in that regard. If the user submits the request via POST, then the results are not prefixed. For example, if the request is submitted from an html form with method set to "post". I submit that allowing users to GET (clean) results without using Javascript would be a privacy improvement over Google. Not to mention that it would please many users who get frustrated when trying to copy links from a Google results page only to find they have been prefixed and loaded with Google url parameters. Users deserve clean result links. To see the difference between prefixed and non-prefixed result links: curl -o a.htm https://duckduckgo.com/lite/?q=example.com grep -m1 .=result-link a.htm curl -o b.htm -d "q=example.com" https://duckduckgo.com/lite/ grep -m1 .=result-link b.htm
- jolmg 8y ago> Whatever the reasons may be for this decision, it allows DDG to track all links that the user follows from the results page. That is no better than Google. It is not a privacy improvement in that regard. It's meant so that the sites you click on can't see your search queries via the Referer HTTP header. You can turn that off in DDG's settings[1] under the privacy tab. It's the "Redirect" switch. They explain more about it[2]. Basically, it's a privacy choice they give you between preventing sites you visit from seeing your search queries or preventing DDG from seeing what you clicked on. If you want, you can prevent both by enabling their settings option to use POST instead of GET in their search. Then you can disable the redirect and the sites won't be able to see your search query from Referer, because it would have been passed through the request body instead of URL parameters. However, that's going to prevent you from being able to have your searches in your browser history. EDIT: I now note why you mentioned javascript and why the Referer option talks about being needed on old browsers. It seems that when javascript is enabled, they do something else to ensure that Referer doesn't leak search queries without passing info on what you clicked on to DDG. That means that, by default on a typical browser, both leaks are prevented. That's pretty neat. [1] https://duckduckgo.com/settings# https://duckduckgo.com/settings# [2] https://duck.co/help/results/rduckduckgocom https://duck.co/help/results/rduckduckgocom
- webo 8y agoI can’t tell if everyone here is serious when they say they haven’t looked back. Google knowledge graph is years ahead of DDG. Average person does not want to click through results, s/he just wants the answer. Compare these queries in Google vs. ddg: - nba scores - 2018 super bowl - lakers roster - movies in theatres - game of thrones cast - $aapl - where is my phone - 2019 thanksgiving etc
- jolmg 8y agoIf you want to help break a monopoly, you'll have to bear with not having all the features only a monopoly can provide. Scrolling a bit or even clicking on "More results" is not that big of an inconvenience for me to completely drop them. I will admit though that when a search fails for me, I may at times check the same search query at Google, but I now use Google for like 10% of my searches or so.
- SuoDuanDao 8y agoPerhaps the average person is not on hacker news.
- kelnos 8y agoI can't say I haven't looked back; occasionally I'll fall back to Google when DDG is having trouble finding what I want to find. Even then, it's certainly less than 10% of the time (maybe even less than 5%), and I find when I have to do that, Google's results aren't super high quality either (though most of the time the quality is just better enough that it turned out to be useful to have the Google fallback). As for just "getting the answer", I suspect you're right most of the time, but I really don't mind clicking through the first few results links to see the answer. Figuring out the best answer and putting it in-line with the search results is a nice-to-have for me, but certainly not essential. Also note that I'm making a trade-off here: lower search result quality in return for not having my search history tracked. For many people, I imagine they don't care about their privacy as much and will make the opposite trade-off. That's fine; I'm just glad we have good enough options so people can make that decision and not be forced one way or the other.
- TheSmiddy 8y ago
- imhelpingu 8y agoI switched my browsers to using DuckDuckGo as the default search engine and almost miss never Google at all. Any time I do miss Google, I just manually navigate to Bing and use that instead.
- paul7986 8y agoI started using DDG everywhere in December after reading a story how Google tried to steal a MIT researcher's work. I thought they "Do No Evil," were all about corporate and social good? That's the image I once had!
- dvcrn 8y agoDDG gets simple things right, but for more complex queries I still have to fallback to google sadly
- pmoriarty 8y agoCan you give an example of such a complex query which performs better on google than DDG?
- yeahitslikethat 8y agoHow do I make ddg the default on my old android phone?
- skarz 8y agoI believe in everything DDG stands for but just earlier I did a search comparison to see which search engine provided the most helpful results. I searched 'asus block third party firmware' (no quotes) and objectively I have to say that Google provided the most helpful results. Search yourself and see if you come to the same conclusion.
- marcrosoft 8y agoI want to use this but the scroll responsiveness is slow and it lacks a solid way to refresh.
- la_fayette 8y agoDDG is absolutely great! I am not sure if they are a profitable company yet? It would be great to have different players on the www again, not just monopolies...
- scoutt 8y agoI'm glad they're moving forward, but I still don't buy it. Someone is tossing a big load of money on them (you know that when you see their ad in twitter every day, and articles like this), specially in the last year. When that happens, investors will want their return, no matter what. People saying they respect your privacy, but... how do you really know? Also because "improved privacy" != "no targeted ads". They can still do massive amounts of money from the data we provide. At some point: 1) they would have to comply with some law somewhere, handling user data (logs). 2) they may become the number 2 search engine. Spammers will target them and they would have to start doing some behavioral analysis on "what links worked well to those kind of users" to fix that. Are they so transparent and well intentioned? Is their system so simple, so innocuous and filled only with anonymous data? Fine, they should Open-source the engine and servers, prove that they are using the same code we see, give us RO access to the DBs, and the equivalent of a MacDonalds kitchen tour. Otherwise, they are just relying on nice words.
- Vinnl 8y ago> how do you really know? You don't really know. However, when your entire USP is being privacy-friendly (and really, that's the primary feature that Google can't copy), it would be incredibly damaging if word got out that that wasn't true. And we can be reasonably certain that, if it wasn't true, word would get out. Also note that DDG explicitly says they don't do user tracking. So while ads are targeted in the sense that you'll see ads relevant to the search term you're using (and your location and other data attached to the query), they're not keeping a profile of you and targeting ads based on that. In other words: there should be no significant user data for them to hand over. I'm not sure why they would have to become the number 2 search engine at some point, although regular search engine manipulation does already seem to affect them sometimes. I don't see why they would have to track users to combat that. Sure, open source would be nice. But right now, we do have reason to assume that they're at least significantly better than Google, without having to sacrifice a lot in search result quality.
- scoutt 8y ago> we do have reason to assume > word would get out > no significant user data These, as you say, are assumptions. That's why I don't (still) buy it. They are in "sell" mode right now. They would say anything to gain traction, and it's working. That's why they are pushing hard and investing a lot. Remember it's about making BIG money through an advertisement-based business, what could possibly go wrong? Imagine that you are magically handled the DB for the searches done today. What would you can possible learn from that information? Perhaps you can't track what searches did HN user Vinnl, but the info has surely a value. They may not be honest about what are they doing with that information.
- cygned 8y agoI switched to DDG for two reasons: - Privacy - It doesn't try to be smarter than me More often when I use Google to search (e.g. for research), it decides to ignore one or multiple words, yielding irrelevant results. It's fixable, I can quote them, it even offers to do that, but it drives me nuts.
- anonytrary 8y agoI'm not trying to defend Google by any means, but I've always wondered how DDG can be as profitable as Google if they take into account less information when showing you ads. Surely using more information allows you to more efficiently match supply with potential demand, which is the point of ads. Is there any research out there that shows that this efficiency gap does not exist? I don't use or follow Facebook that much, but every time I hear Mark Zuckerberg defending Facebook's business model, he always says something like "we want to make sure the ads you see are actually useful/relevant to you". Is there a way to achieve this outcome without taking into account more personal information?
- Ixio 8y agoThe way I see it everyone should have some sort of personal data broker (maybe as a browser extension ?). Your data broker has all of your personal information and keeps it safe for you. If you make a query on a search engine I'm sure we can find a way to have better results without the search engine retaining your private information. Either there is some kind of third party you can temporarily give your info to and trust it to forget it immediatly after giving you the results. Or the search engine could give standard results and your data broker then filters it using your info (which doesn't leave your pc). I used to think of this data broker as some sort of AI but now that I think about it maybe a simple browser extension that filters Google search results or augments your DDG queries might do the trick.
- probably_wrong 8y ago> I've always wondered how DDG can be as profitable as Google if they take into account less information when showing you ads AFAIK, no one has conclusively shown that highly targeted ads perform better than interest-based ones (as in, putting ads for cars in car magazines). In fact, I'm under the impression that "we don't really know what we are doing" is the ad industry's secret. The Atlantic calls this Wanamaker's Paradox[1], in honor of a retailer that said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don't know which half". If DDG is right and showing ads based on your search terms is enough, then you'd expect them to get ahead of Google, because they would have similar profits with less overhead. Of course, there is much more to Google's dominance than "because they show better ads", so I don't think "efficiency gap" is the best way to look at it anyway. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/a-dangerous-question-does-internet-advertising-work-at-all/372704/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/a-dange...
- agumonkey 8y agoddg is nice for the bangs (although sometimes they drop some) and for very simple queries for the rest you're only one !g away from the usual
- En_gr_Student 8y agoGoogle built things that circumvent it. I love how commercials "follow you around". If I search for diamond rings in a browser on one computer, they suddenly materialize everywhere. I tried it with Duck-Duck-go, searching for something I nearly never search for, something such that the ads follow you around. I just searched in DDG, but did not go to the end website. I then resumed non-DDG browsing, and those came up as ads. I don't know if they are looking at image caches, or loading javascript libraries. They have a way around it already, and it runs.
- oth001 8y agoStartpage.com ?