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A company that purchases data from another search engine (that most likely also uses aggregated personal data to deliver results) with just two products (search

A company that purchases data from another search engine (that most likely also uses aggregated personal data to deliver results) with just two products (search + browser) compares its app data usage to a behemoth that strives for the most personalized experience possible in exchange for personal data in order to display personalized ads. Google's apps offer opt-in voice search (solving Audio), optional end to end encryption for bookmarks & search history (solving Browsing History), while location and diagnostics are opt in as well and it's also up to you if you want to store your address book of store you credit card with Google (solving Contacts & Financial Info). Yes, most people will probably use Google Contacts, Maps, unencrypted bookmarks & browsing history and and store their credit card data in the browser, but you're not forced to do that. I really wish DDG would innovate on search, improve their own crawlers & indexing and then attack Google head on by comparing better results with the ad-ridden, SEO-flooded shit show that Google results have become. Instead, their marketing keeps on comparing apples to oranges and just keeps on playing the privacy angle, which is intellectually dishonest because DDG and Google have completely different goals. Boy do I hope for some real competition in the search engine market. Brave and Neeva can't launch soon enough. I'm so sick and tired of giving DDG changes upon changes only to switch back to Google because the results haven't improved much.

Seirdy 6y ago
> I really wish DDG would innovate on search, improve their own crawlers & indexing and then attack Google head on by comparing better results with the ad-ridden, SEO-flooded shit show that Google results have become. DuckDuckGo's organic results are proxied from Bing (or sometimes Yandex). Their crawler (DuckDuckBot) just fetches favicons and scrapes data for a few Instant Answers. Most of DuckDuckGo's non-privacy-related selling points are their instant answers, which in my experience are really good. Alternative indexing engines to the "Big Three" English indexers (Google, Bing, Yandex) with decent privacy include Mojeek, Right Dao, Gigablast, Gowiki, wbsrch, and others. I've counted 16 English alternatives in all.
- lixquid 6y ago
  > Most of DuckDuckGo's non-privacy-related selling points are their instant answers, which in my experience are really good. And yet has no undeprecated pipeline for submitting non-"essential bug fixes" to[1]. I really love the idea of having an engine that does just a little bit more for me up front, but not if it's all closed off; that's what I'm trying to get away from. [1]: https://duckduckhack.com/ https://duckduckhack.com/
Bancakes 6y ago
Google just doesn't optimise their software and deployments. I can run searx, email, git, jitsi, invidious, and other various software on an old Xeon PC from aliexpress. Meanwhile youtube stores 10 versions of the same video on their platform, and dares bring up costs vs revenue arguments.

Seirdy 6y ago

> I really wish DDG would innovate on search, improve their own crawlers & indexing and then attack Google head on by comparing better results with the ad-ridden, SEO-flooded shit show that Google results have become. DuckDuckGo's organic results are proxied from Bing (or sometimes Yandex). Their crawler (DuckDuckBot) just fetches favicons and scrapes data for a few Instant Answers. Most of DuckDuckGo's non-privacy-related selling points are their instant answers, which in my experience are really good. Alternative indexing engines to the "Big Three" English indexers (Google, Bing, Yandex) with decent privacy include Mojeek, Right Dao, Gigablast, Gowiki, wbsrch, and others. I've counted 16 English alternatives in all.

lixquid 6y ago
> Most of DuckDuckGo's non-privacy-related selling points are their instant answers, which in my experience are really good. And yet has no undeprecated pipeline for submitting non-"essential bug fixes" to[1]. I really love the idea of having an engine that does just a little bit more for me up front, but not if it's all closed off; that's what I'm trying to get away from. [1]: https://duckduckhack.com/ https://duckduckhack.com/

Bancakes 6y ago

Google just doesn't optimise their software and deployments. I can run searx, email, git, jitsi, invidious, and other various software on an old Xeon PC from aliexpress. Meanwhile youtube stores 10 versions of the same video on their platform, and dares bring up costs vs revenue arguments.