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> Startpage recently got acquired, and is now (at least partially) owned by an advertising company. As a privacy advocate, I don't trust them. I use DuckDuckGo,

> Startpage recently got acquired, and is now (at least partially) owned by an advertising company. As a privacy advocate, I don't trust them. I use DuckDuckGo, I don't use Startpage. Not following the logic there. How is DuckDuckGo not an (entirely) advertising company? Do they make money off anything else other than ads and injecting affiliate links?

danShumway 7y ago
Yeah, I should have clarified more. DuckDuckGo and Startpage always made money with advertising. The problem with Startpage's acquisition is the introduction of System1/Privacy One, which is not just focused on advertising, but on advertising based on consumer intent/interested, calculated by large-scale collection of consumer data.[0] > “In our business,” Blend adds, “if we can gather as much data as possible, give it off to our engineers and data scientists, and then manage the two effectively, the business can quickly scale.” Again, even though I don't trust System 1/Privacy One as much as I trust DuckDuckGo, I do still trust them more than Google. [0]: https://csq.com/2018/01/system-1-silicon-beach-sleeping-giant/ https://csq.com/2018/01/system-1-silicon-beach-sleeping-gian...
- freediver 7y ago
  That makes sense. I would still argue that Google back in the day when it only had 30M queries/day (like DDG has today) was no worse than DDG today, and that is the only fair comparison. Increased popularity together with influx of advertising money caused it to adopt product features and policies that allowed those advertisers to convert better, and make more money. So basically what you are saying is "I trust that Weinberg & co are immune to that kind of pressure" or that their primary motives are altruistic in nature and will always stay such. For me personally that is a hard sell. The elephant in the room is advertising based business models for search engines, and any company adopting it will be tempted to follow the path of Google if such opportunity is presented to it.
  - danShumway 7y ago
    > "I trust that Weinberg & co are immune to that kind of pressure" or that their primary motives are altruistic in nature and will always stay such. No, not at all. I trust that right now Weinberg & co are less likely to be actively caving to that pressure or actively exploiting my information. Trust is always a moving target, but right now I know that Google logs literally everything I click on associated to an IP address, and uses that for targeted ads. As far as I know, Startpage doesn't currently do that, though I expect them to get more aggressive about data in the future. DuckDuckGo (most likely) also doesn't do that, and I expect it to take them some time and have additional warning signs before they start doing it. The link wrapping is a good example of something measurable that matters at this moment. You can use Startpage without Javascript and with a few browser-level features toggled and be pretty certain that the actual link you click on will be impossible for them to log. With Google search, today, there's no way to do that.
    - freediver 7y ago
      Fair enough. Btw I find link wrapping is annoying, you could do it also with javascript, but it is necessary to improve the quality of search results. I would also want to know what results work for which queries.

danShumway 7y ago

Yeah, I should have clarified more. DuckDuckGo and Startpage always made money with advertising. The problem with Startpage's acquisition is the introduction of System1/Privacy One, which is not just focused on advertising, but on advertising based on consumer intent/interested, calculated by large-scale collection of consumer data.[0] > “In our business,” Blend adds, “if we can gather as much data as possible, give it off to our engineers and data scientists, and then manage the two effectively, the business can quickly scale.” Again, even though I don't trust System 1/Privacy One as much as I trust DuckDuckGo, I do still trust them more than Google. [0]: https://csq.com/2018/01/system-1-silicon-beach-sleeping-giant/ https://csq.com/2018/01/system-1-silicon-beach-sleeping-gian...

freediver 7y ago
That makes sense. I would still argue that Google back in the day when it only had 30M queries/day (like DDG has today) was no worse than DDG today, and that is the only fair comparison. Increased popularity together with influx of advertising money caused it to adopt product features and policies that allowed those advertisers to convert better, and make more money. So basically what you are saying is "I trust that Weinberg & co are immune to that kind of pressure" or that their primary motives are altruistic in nature and will always stay such. For me personally that is a hard sell. The elephant in the room is advertising based business models for search engines, and any company adopting it will be tempted to follow the path of Google if such opportunity is presented to it.
- danShumway 7y ago
  > "I trust that Weinberg & co are immune to that kind of pressure" or that their primary motives are altruistic in nature and will always stay such. No, not at all. I trust that right now Weinberg & co are less likely to be actively caving to that pressure or actively exploiting my information. Trust is always a moving target, but right now I know that Google logs literally everything I click on associated to an IP address, and uses that for targeted ads. As far as I know, Startpage doesn't currently do that, though I expect them to get more aggressive about data in the future. DuckDuckGo (most likely) also doesn't do that, and I expect it to take them some time and have additional warning signs before they start doing it. The link wrapping is a good example of something measurable that matters at this moment. You can use Startpage without Javascript and with a few browser-level features toggled and be pretty certain that the actual link you click on will be impossible for them to log. With Google search, today, there's no way to do that.
  - freediver 7y ago
    Fair enough. Btw I find link wrapping is annoying, you could do it also with javascript, but it is necessary to improve the quality of search results. I would also want to know what results work for which queries.