2 ms·

2 more for search, Yandex is growing fast and getting really good, and DuckDuckGo of course. I've been using Yandex a lot lately. Their products are getting mor

by mcovey 14y ago

2 more for search, Yandex is growing fast and getting really good, and DuckDuckGo of course. I've been using Yandex a lot lately. Their products are getting more available in English, in fact they have webmail with a built-in RSS reader that resembles google reader.

rdl 14y ago
DDG is essentially passthrough to Google/Bing/Blekko, though, so you're still somewhat exposed to the risk of those companies being crazy. Although I guess 3 is enough that DDG should be able to survive even if 1-2 go crazy or die. It's perhaps somewhat nationalist, but Russian companies are slightly above Chinese companies on my list of "would I want my traffic going through their infrastructure", from a privacy/information security standpoint. I don't think this is irrational. (The US is far from ideal either, but has stronger laws, although is more likely to be "interested". The ideal would be a Canadian or European search provider run in some kind of hostproof model.)
- kamaal 14y ago
  DDG has their own crawler, but its difficult to take on a giant gorilla like Google in one shot. I think over time DDG will do just fine.
- xentronium 14y ago
  My vouch wouldn't probably mean much, but yandex are by and large not-evil guys. They can be forced to abide the law, but I believe they haven't willfully done anything really unethical yet. Unfortunately, yandex search is inferior to google for English queries, which diminishes their usefulness a lot.
  - rdl 14y ago
    I tend to trust almost all techies by default, but their government, not so much. The same thing applies to the US, though, although at least in the US there's enough precedent from pre-2001 or pre-1990s to restrain the government slightly. Russia and China don't have the extended period of relative legal sanity the US had from ~1781 to sometime in the 1900s, or common law tradition from England from 1300 onward.

by mcovey 14y ago

rdl 14y ago

DDG is essentially passthrough to Google/Bing/Blekko, though, so you're still somewhat exposed to the risk of those companies being crazy. Although I guess 3 is enough that DDG should be able to survive even if 1-2 go crazy or die. It's perhaps somewhat nationalist, but Russian companies are slightly above Chinese companies on my list of "would I want my traffic going through their infrastructure", from a privacy/information security standpoint. I don't think this is irrational. (The US is far from ideal either, but has stronger laws, although is more likely to be "interested". The ideal would be a Canadian or European search provider run in some kind of hostproof model.)

kamaal 14y ago
DDG has their own crawler, but its difficult to take on a giant gorilla like Google in one shot. I think over time DDG will do just fine.
xentronium 14y ago
My vouch wouldn't probably mean much, but yandex are by and large not-evil guys. They can be forced to abide the law, but I believe they haven't willfully done anything really unethical yet. Unfortunately, yandex search is inferior to google for English queries, which diminishes their usefulness a lot.
- rdl 14y ago
  I tend to trust almost all techies by default, but their government, not so much. The same thing applies to the US, though, although at least in the US there's enough precedent from pre-2001 or pre-1990s to restrain the government slightly. Russia and China don't have the extended period of relative legal sanity the US had from ~1781 to sometime in the 1900s, or common law tradition from England from 1300 onward.