4 ms·

> if you can't find something You don’t always know what you don’t know. If I don’t know about YouTube-dl and I search “download YouTube command line”, how am

> if you can't find something You don’t always know what you don’t know. If I don’t know about YouTube-dl and I search “download YouTube command line”, how am I going to know that ddg is hiding the best result from me? This definitely isn’t a small annoyance kind of problem, in my eyes. It’s a deal breaker. I’ll never use ddg again. If they’re going to censor like Google does, then I’m going to use Google because it generally has better results. Ddg needs to offer something beyond what Google offers to make up for their bad results, and they aren’t doing that.

lamontcg 5y ago
> Ddg needs to offer something beyond what Google offers If you're searching on google for medical terms it builds a profile on you, and you should be concerned that they could be selling that information to insurers, directly or indirectly.
- 14 5y ago
  I've been curious about this as a health care worker. The number of times I've looked up a client condition to better help the person I can't count. So is googles profile of me tainted?
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    I would be somewhat worried that information could be abused now or in the future. Since that data is necessarily going to be noisy, insurers probably aren't going to make black and white decisions based on it, but they could score you somewhat worse over it. You could maybe trust them that their algorithms would be able to determine that since you work in health care and are probably in the top 5% of people who search health terms that your individual data is polluted by your job, but I would never trust an insurer's black-box algorithms. They only need to be statistically correct over the population, they can always fuck you over individually and still make a fantastic profit for themselves. Is this really going on? Maybe not, but is it worth it to ignore the risk? Can you just use DDG so it isn't a question?
    - 14 5y ago
      I have long ago switched to ddg but was curious about it as a past google user
  - Brian_K_White 5y ago
    probably not, because probably they also know your occupation, or you crossed a threshold of too many to be normal/direct etc. (except in reality it's less simple than "they know your occupation", it's a huge cloud of data points that an ai makes correlations and assosciations that no human actually knows. It means the searches would also be weighted by indirect things like, not only your occupation but your assosciations. Say you don't have the medical occupation, but your computer makes a lot of medical searches, because your roomate in your college dorm has a medical major etc. And right now, the ais are still pretty stupid and absolutely making a lot of obvious unsafe conclusions, but they also do get more and more spooky every day.) But this doesn't make it any better. If they did a perfectly accurate job of profiling you, that is not better than doing an inaccurate job. That much insight is like being married to someone, where they intimately know all your biases and motivations, know all your buttons, know how to manipulate you, know how to weigh any opinions you might express against their knowledge of where you got every idea you ever had, except it isn't a marriage, and they aren't subject to all that same vulnerability to you, and they aren't even a human but a corporation, and they have this intimate knowledge of everyone not just one spouse or sibling or best friend.
  - zedadex 5y ago
    They probably have a good idea of what those profiles look like, even if they don't already know you work in healthcare.

lamontcg 5y ago

> Ddg needs to offer something beyond what Google offers If you're searching on google for medical terms it builds a profile on you, and you should be concerned that they could be selling that information to insurers, directly or indirectly.

14 5y ago
I've been curious about this as a health care worker. The number of times I've looked up a client condition to better help the person I can't count. So is googles profile of me tainted?
- lamontcg 5y ago
  I would be somewhat worried that information could be abused now or in the future. Since that data is necessarily going to be noisy, insurers probably aren't going to make black and white decisions based on it, but they could score you somewhat worse over it. You could maybe trust them that their algorithms would be able to determine that since you work in health care and are probably in the top 5% of people who search health terms that your individual data is polluted by your job, but I would never trust an insurer's black-box algorithms. They only need to be statistically correct over the population, they can always fuck you over individually and still make a fantastic profit for themselves. Is this really going on? Maybe not, but is it worth it to ignore the risk? Can you just use DDG so it isn't a question?
  - 14 5y ago
    I have long ago switched to ddg but was curious about it as a past google user
- Brian_K_White 5y ago
  probably not, because probably they also know your occupation, or you crossed a threshold of too many to be normal/direct etc. (except in reality it's less simple than "they know your occupation", it's a huge cloud of data points that an ai makes correlations and assosciations that no human actually knows. It means the searches would also be weighted by indirect things like, not only your occupation but your assosciations. Say you don't have the medical occupation, but your computer makes a lot of medical searches, because your roomate in your college dorm has a medical major etc. And right now, the ais are still pretty stupid and absolutely making a lot of obvious unsafe conclusions, but they also do get more and more spooky every day.) But this doesn't make it any better. If they did a perfectly accurate job of profiling you, that is not better than doing an inaccurate job. That much insight is like being married to someone, where they intimately know all your biases and motivations, know all your buttons, know how to manipulate you, know how to weigh any opinions you might express against their knowledge of where you got every idea you ever had, except it isn't a marriage, and they aren't subject to all that same vulnerability to you, and they aren't even a human but a corporation, and they have this intimate knowledge of everyone not just one spouse or sibling or best friend.
- zedadex 5y ago
  They probably have a good idea of what those profiles look like, even if they don't already know you work in healthcare.