5 ms·

This article is pure crybaby bullshit PR about a nonexistent problem. Does anyone care about DDG anyway? They're trying to solve a completely imaginary problem,

This article is pure crybaby bullshit PR about a nonexistent problem. Does anyone care about DDG anyway? They're trying to solve a completely imaginary problem, and they haven't got a hope in hell of creating a viable search engine as that costs billions of dollars. Why is this article even on HN?

fudged71 14y ago
Why are you here? This is entirely relevant to HN. How is a small business that does things uniquely supposed to get users when their biggest competitor is actively making it difficult to try the other service out? Regardless of whether their claims are true or not, that is.
neya 14y ago
While I agree with you on the problem solving part, I feel you are a bit aggressive. >Why is this article even on HN? I think its relevant because PG wrote an article about "frighteningly ambitious ideas" and DuckDuckGo seems to be inspired from it.
javajosh 14y ago
Why is your comment the #1 comment? I mean, I count 3, count them, 3 unsubstantiated claims: 1. Does anyone care about DDG anyway? I think it's safe to say, yes, there are some who do. I for one. 2. The problem DDG is solving is imaginary. Oh really? What precisely is that problem? Is it search itself that you're referring to, or the prospect of going up against Google? If the former, then you are delusional, and if the latter, there is nothing wrong with attempting to disrupt a monopoly. 3. A search engine costs billions of dollars. Actually, no. There is no rule of computer science that says that. If someone discovers a new, cheaper way to do search then cool! In answer to your final question, perhaps the reason this article is on HN is to inspire comments like yours, which are wrong, and then comments like mine, which correct comments like yours.
- ok_craig 14y ago
  I think the imaginary problem he meant was searching without being "tracked." The vast majority of users simply don't care. The ones who do can get around it.
- greglindahl 14y ago
  Blekko has a 4 billion page crawl and index, and we've only raised $55 million so far.
  - Surio 14y ago
    Greg, I love the work you guys have put on Blekko so far (and keep putting). Thanks. Keep it up!
- paulsutter 14y ago
  The privacy problem is imaginary because (a) only a puny fraction of users care, and (b) thanks to the "patriot" act, our ISPs are storing our search history anyway. I have worked on search (see my background), and doing search well is massively difficult. The problem has deep necessary complexity, and Google has invested thousands of PhD years against that already. If Google were incompetent, maybe I could see it. But they're damned smart and their product is extremely good. Data is also a problem - Microsoft has been collecting all your google searches since IE8, and can probably just clone Google's search results for the top few million queries. But even given that, Bing is a massive undertaking. Since nobody uses DDG, Google can't be expected to make them a default search choice in Chrome. Accusing Google of some malfeasance is just childish and silly. Finally, the name DDG is atrocious. Really bad in more ways than I have time to list.
  - mistercow 14y ago
    >thanks to the "patriot" act, our ISPs are storing our search history anyway. I think you're thinking of PCIPA (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Children_from_Internet_Pornographers_Act_of_2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Children_from_Intern... ), which would do that, but is still a long way from becoming law. I am fairly sure that the USA PATRIOT Act does not contain any such provision.
    - paulsutter 14y ago
      From the EFF, regarding the "Patriot" act: "At the very least, this change means that the government can use a pen-trap to see the email addresses of people youre sending email to and the addresses of people who send email to you, along with the timestamp and size in bytes of each email. The FBI can monitor the IP addresses of all the computers you interact with over the Internet, or capture the IP addresses of every person visiting a particular website. Under the vaguely written statute, it may even be able to capture the URL of every web page that you read, although the FBI refuses to confirm or deny whether it has done so." Sure, I should have inserted the word [can], but it hardly changes the point. Given the direction laws have taken since 9/11, you would be foolish to rely on your search activity remaining anonymous. http://w2.eff.org/patriot/sunset/214.php http://w2.eff.org/patriot/sunset/214.php
timdorr 14y ago
I agree. Especially when I got to this part: In an interview on Wednesday, Weinberg said it is difficult to make his DuckDuckGo the default search site in Google's Chrome web browser. I just hit ⌘+' on my keyboard and selected duckduckgo.com from a drop down. I didn't even have to hit save and it starts working with DDG immediately. How is that difficult?
amitamb 14y ago
Is it PR bullshit? It probably is, but are their claims entirely wrong. If you see my comments, they are not entirely baseless. Let's not kid ourselves, Google is a good company but they have to defend their position. Not just DuckDuckGo, but even your supposed billion dollar search engine will face same issues mentioned in the article. So this is not about the DuckDuckGo as a company but about monopolistic practices. Let's talk about that.
yegg 14y ago
Hi, this is Gabriel Weinberg, the guy mentioned in the article. The main issue I have is with duck.com. A lot of people remember that we are a search engine "duck something" and so naturally try duck.com. As a result, there is a lot of confusion, e.g.: "I was telling someone about DuckDuckGo and they thought it was Duck.com and they went to Google. Is Google using this to find people who make the mistake to Duck.com instead of DuckDuckGo?" "Can't you do something about this? I keep going to Duck.com when meaning to visit DuckDuckGo.com They are using the DuckDuckGo name to get people to search Google." This only started happening after I asked about the domain name. It used to point to a history page about Duck Corporation (previous name of On2 -- http://web.archive.org/web/20100802014055/http://duck.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20100802014055/http://duck.com/), similar to http://www.on2.com/ http://www.on2.com/, which was acquired by Google in the same acquisition. Google should legitimately not sell it to me, though it would have been of course nice to do so when I first asked in 2010. I think an appropriate remedy would be to either point it nowhere, point it to the original page it had been pointed to for many years, or point it to the acquisition page (as http://on2.com http://on2.com still does) -- all things they do in other cases if you look at past acquisitions. Just to be clear, it is only anti-competitive because it causes confusion, and relates to their core search product. The facts of the situation (that it switched shortly after I asked, and only seemingly that one domain) make it appear to be deliberate. And if it were not deliberate, I've brought this up many times and there has been ample time (including now!) to correct the situation. With regards to being easy to add search engines to Chrome, see http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/02/usability-issues-with-adding-search-engines-to-web-browsers.html http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/02/usability-issues.... I've written up the differences extensively, with screenshots and explanatory notes.
- fauigerzigerk 14y ago
  There's something else I'm starting to worry about. Some websites (e.g. The Financial Times) restrict access to their subscription only content to the Googlebot (and presumably Bing/Yahoo). Is that something you worry about? Do you just ignore that content or do you talk to the website owners if you feel they are important enough?
- prawn 14y ago
irahul 14y ago
> Does anyone care about DDG anyway? The number of votes and comments tell me people on this forum do care. Personally, I care because DDG is doing something ambitious and competition is good(it helps keep people in line). Also, even if I didn't care, I don't see a reason why I should shit on someone's hard work. > They're trying to solve a completely imaginary problem, Privacy isn't an imaginary problem. > and they haven't got a hope in hell of creating a viable search engine as that costs billions of dollars. Creating one from scratch will take time and money, and no, as blekko folks pointed out, it didn't take them billions. But DDG uses bing apis augmented with custom index.

fudged71 14y ago

Why are you here? This is entirely relevant to HN. How is a small business that does things uniquely supposed to get users when their biggest competitor is actively making it difficult to try the other service out? Regardless of whether their claims are true or not, that is.

neya 14y ago

While I agree with you on the problem solving part, I feel you are a bit aggressive. >Why is this article even on HN? I think its relevant because PG wrote an article about "frighteningly ambitious ideas" and DuckDuckGo seems to be inspired from it.

javajosh 14y ago

Why is your comment the #1 comment? I mean, I count 3, count them, 3 unsubstantiated claims: 1. Does anyone care about DDG anyway? I think it's safe to say, yes, there are some who do. I for one. 2. The problem DDG is solving is imaginary. Oh really? What precisely is that problem? Is it search itself that you're referring to, or the prospect of going up against Google? If the former, then you are delusional, and if the latter, there is nothing wrong with attempting to disrupt a monopoly. 3. A search engine costs billions of dollars. Actually, no. There is no rule of computer science that says that. If someone discovers a new, cheaper way to do search then cool! In answer to your final question, perhaps the reason this article is on HN is to inspire comments like yours, which are wrong, and then comments like mine, which correct comments like yours.

ok_craig 14y ago
I think the imaginary problem he meant was searching without being "tracked." The vast majority of users simply don't care. The ones who do can get around it.
greglindahl 14y ago
Blekko has a 4 billion page crawl and index, and we've only raised $55 million so far.
- Surio 14y ago
  Greg, I love the work you guys have put on Blekko so far (and keep putting). Thanks. Keep it up!
paulsutter 14y ago
The privacy problem is imaginary because (a) only a puny fraction of users care, and (b) thanks to the "patriot" act, our ISPs are storing our search history anyway. I have worked on search (see my background), and doing search well is massively difficult. The problem has deep necessary complexity, and Google has invested thousands of PhD years against that already. If Google were incompetent, maybe I could see it. But they're damned smart and their product is extremely good. Data is also a problem - Microsoft has been collecting all your google searches since IE8, and can probably just clone Google's search results for the top few million queries. But even given that, Bing is a massive undertaking. Since nobody uses DDG, Google can't be expected to make them a default search choice in Chrome. Accusing Google of some malfeasance is just childish and silly. Finally, the name DDG is atrocious. Really bad in more ways than I have time to list.
- mistercow 14y ago
  >thanks to the "patriot" act, our ISPs are storing our search history anyway. I think you're thinking of PCIPA (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Children_from_Internet_Pornographers_Act_of_2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Children_from_Intern... ), which would do that, but is still a long way from becoming law. I am fairly sure that the USA PATRIOT Act does not contain any such provision.
  - paulsutter 14y ago
    From the EFF, regarding the "Patriot" act: "At the very least, this change means that the government can use a pen-trap to see the email addresses of people youre sending email to and the addresses of people who send email to you, along with the timestamp and size in bytes of each email. The FBI can monitor the IP addresses of all the computers you interact with over the Internet, or capture the IP addresses of every person visiting a particular website. Under the vaguely written statute, it may even be able to capture the URL of every web page that you read, although the FBI refuses to confirm or deny whether it has done so." Sure, I should have inserted the word [can], but it hardly changes the point. Given the direction laws have taken since 9/11, you would be foolish to rely on your search activity remaining anonymous. http://w2.eff.org/patriot/sunset/214.php http://w2.eff.org/patriot/sunset/214.php

timdorr 14y ago

I agree. Especially when I got to this part: In an interview on Wednesday, Weinberg said it is difficult to make his DuckDuckGo the default search site in Google's Chrome web browser. I just hit ⌘+' on my keyboard and selected duckduckgo.com from a drop down. I didn't even have to hit save and it starts working with DDG immediately. How is that difficult?

amitamb 14y ago

Is it PR bullshit? It probably is, but are their claims entirely wrong. If you see my comments, they are not entirely baseless. Let's not kid ourselves, Google is a good company but they have to defend their position. Not just DuckDuckGo, but even your supposed billion dollar search engine will face same issues mentioned in the article. So this is not about the DuckDuckGo as a company but about monopolistic practices. Let's talk about that.

yegg 14y ago

Hi, this is Gabriel Weinberg, the guy mentioned in the article. The main issue I have is with duck.com. A lot of people remember that we are a search engine "duck something" and so naturally try duck.com. As a result, there is a lot of confusion, e.g.: "I was telling someone about DuckDuckGo and they thought it was Duck.com and they went to Google. Is Google using this to find people who make the mistake to Duck.com instead of DuckDuckGo?" "Can't you do something about this? I keep going to Duck.com when meaning to visit DuckDuckGo.com They are using the DuckDuckGo name to get people to search Google." This only started happening after I asked about the domain name. It used to point to a history page about Duck Corporation (previous name of On2 -- http://web.archive.org/web/20100802014055/http://duck.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20100802014055/http://duck.com/), similar to http://www.on2.com/ http://www.on2.com/, which was acquired by Google in the same acquisition. Google should legitimately not sell it to me, though it would have been of course nice to do so when I first asked in 2010. I think an appropriate remedy would be to either point it nowhere, point it to the original page it had been pointed to for many years, or point it to the acquisition page (as http://on2.com http://on2.com still does) -- all things they do in other cases if you look at past acquisitions. Just to be clear, it is only anti-competitive because it causes confusion, and relates to their core search product. The facts of the situation (that it switched shortly after I asked, and only seemingly that one domain) make it appear to be deliberate. And if it were not deliberate, I've brought this up many times and there has been ample time (including now!) to correct the situation. With regards to being easy to add search engines to Chrome, see http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/02/usability-issues-with-adding-search-engines-to-web-browsers.html http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/02/usability-issues.... I've written up the differences extensively, with screenshots and explanatory notes.

fauigerzigerk 14y ago
There's something else I'm starting to worry about. Some websites (e.g. The Financial Times) restrict access to their subscription only content to the Googlebot (and presumably Bing/Yahoo). Is that something you worry about? Do you just ignore that content or do you talk to the website owners if you feel they are important enough?
prawn 14y ago

irahul 14y ago

> Does anyone care about DDG anyway? The number of votes and comments tell me people on this forum do care. Personally, I care because DDG is doing something ambitious and competition is good(it helps keep people in line). Also, even if I didn't care, I don't see a reason why I should shit on someone's hard work. > They're trying to solve a completely imaginary problem, Privacy isn't an imaginary problem. > and they haven't got a hope in hell of creating a viable search engine as that costs billions of dollars. Creating one from scratch will take time and money, and no, as blekko folks pointed out, it didn't take them billions. But DDG uses bing apis augmented with custom index.