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DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal
DuckDuckGo Google Tracks You We DontEver since the news hit about the NSA PRISM surveillance program in the United States, many people have become much more concerned about what exactly search engines are tracking about them.
- jacobparker 13y agoThey run a tor exit enclave which is really, really, cool; there is a blog post about it here: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/08/duckduckgo-now-operates-a-tor-exit-enclave.html http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/08/duckduckgo-now-o... One motivation for switching: they have lots of "gadgets" like Google, and will take suggestions and/or apparently let you develop new ones. Here is a cool example: https://duckduckgo.com/goodies#Programming/crontab_0_0________usr_bin_nice__n_15__usr_local_ddg_sysadmin_log_logrotate_ubuntu_sh https://duckduckgo.com/goodies#Programming/crontab_0_0______... Another useful feature: https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html I just searched Google (heh) and apparently DDG makes their money from affiliate links at the moment. I've been considering switching to DDG so I'll have to make an effort to do my Amazon searches through them; it's a really easy way to support them. EDIT: useful method of switching: http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/255650 http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/255650
- clicks 13y agoThat is pretty awesome. I'm curious: was the privacy focus by the DDG guys always there, or was it pushed after they found it was a nice advertising point? Either way, I think this is a good enough reason for me to finally make the switch.
- whunut 13y agoI remember the first time (about 6 months ago) I took a look at their about page there was a big emphasis on them not tracking your searches, so I think the sentiment has always been there.
- corin_ 13y agoDDG launched in 2008, so data from 6 months ago doesn't really speak to whether privacy was a part of the original purpose.
- bru 13y agoWhen you look at the timeline[1], the first event is "DontTrack.us", a website[2] dedicated to pointing out google tracking, and linking to DDG in the end. So privacy has always been their focus. It is a nice advertising point, but pushed from the beginning. 1: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html 2: http://donttrack.us/ http://donttrack.us/
- corin_ 13y agoThat timeline begins 1.5 - 2 years after DDG launched.
- crazedpsyc 13y agoIn the very beginning, Gabriel was more focused on the instant answers and hadn't thought much of privacy -- users brought it up after he launched it on HN.
- waffle_ss 13y agoThe Tor Project [discourages exit enclaves][1]: Overall the use of enclaves is not advised for these two main reasons: - They will not be supported in future versions of Tor (> 0.2.3.x) - They do not fit any particular threat model [1]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/ExitEnclave https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/ExitEnclav...
- livnev 13y agoIt's also important to note that not only do they run a Tor exit enclave, they also run a .onion hidden service, which unlike the enclave is not deprecated in the next version, and means that DDG can be accessed without leaving the Tor network.
- qwertzlcoatl 13y agoEverytime I don't get the results I want through DDG (which happens rarely) I just type !sp + searchterm into my search bar and it searches via startpage.com, which uses googles search results without my IP address or searches being recorded, no identifying or tracking cookies are used and SSL encryption is set by default.
- annnnd 13y agoIf NSA could subpoena Google, they can (and probably do) do the same with DDG. Not that I don't wish them success, but PRISM is not the right reason to switch search engine to them.
- theGimp 13y agoIf I recall correctly, DDG claims not to keep a record of your searches, so a subpoena would not provide anyone with much information.
- clicks 13y agoYep, exactly. Now, this makes me wonder: What could be an equivalent implementation for e-mails. An e-mail host that encourages immediate download, totally deletes e-mail contents, deletes logs of any sort, etc. when you delete messages?
- mbq 13y agoYou can start your own mail server and make it encrypt all incoming messages with your GPG or SMIME public key. This way NSA will have to collect your old messages from various senders' servers (or the archive made by their sniffers).
- craigching 13y agoThat's the second time I've seen someone use GPG and the first time I assumed it was a mistype and they meant "PGP", so I looked it up. Just in case anyone was in the same boat as me: http://gnupg.org http://gnupg.org
- mtgx 13y agoI'd be happy even with a host that allows you to delete e-mails en masse, or auto-delete them after a set period of time, say 180 days, which is how much is necessary to pass before the US government considers e-mail "free for all". You could also try Bitmessage or Retroshare, where e-mails are automatically encrypted, and P2P (no central server).
- aidos 13y agoOh that's cool. I'd forgotten they had the traffic up online. I was wondering how many people had switched over to it over the last week (I've gone back to using it as my default engine again - not for the first time). How many queries does google process per day? 1B? DDG is up 1M in the last week. So it could realistically represent a 0.1% drop in traffic for google - or am I way off somehow? It's not unrealistic to think it could go up another magnitude again. Then you're starting to talk about a real impact to Google's bottom line. Very interesting.
- icebraining 13y agoGoogle processes 100B/month[1], so 1M is closer to 0.03%. [1]: http://searchengineland.com/google-search-press-129925 http://searchengineland.com/google-search-press-129925
- andyzweb 13y agoA search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size —pg
- hawkharris 13y agoAt the end of the article the author insinuates that the Bing ad partnership might lend itself to tracking users or otherwise making the service less secure and anonymous. Is that possible?
- JimJames 13y agoIIRC it depends how the ads are routed. The ads could be piped through duckduckgo so Bing only receives searches to return contextual ads for but has no knowledge of the IPs for each search. Duckduckgo then embeds the ads in the search page and returns it to the searcher, then forgets their IP. On the other hand if there's just a bit of javascript on the search page that says "Tell bing to put ads on this page using the search bar text" then bing would be able to link the search to an IP and you lose your privacy.
- lgray 13y agoI was looking into this recently, and I found this, on the FAQ: "Ads cannot be retrieved from the developer directly but instead through the end user's browser. Calling for the Ads from a server will lead to detection and termination of the customer." http://developer.yahoo.com/boss/search/boss_api_guide/sb_sponads_faqs.html http://developer.yahoo.com/boss/search/boss_api_guide/sb_spo...
- Matt_Cutts 13y agoIn the past I believe I've seen search ad links on DDG that included my IP address in the URL.
- throwaway10001 13y agoNice, unsupported low blow to a competitor. Keep looking maybe you'll "find" some with your credit card info and home address.
- Amarandei 13y agoToo bad the actual search results are not relevant at all. I tried searching for something and I switched back to Google in the end.
- dotmanish 13y agoFor the searches that don't bring relevant results, I choose the "Give Feedback" option and report Bad Results. Then I add "!g" to the search and continue.
- hobs 13y agoI will try that out, but just like the parent, I really struggle using DDG because it truly is not returning the results I am looking for.
- mauriziopd 13y agoyou should try !sp since it works like !g but passes through https://startpage.com/ https://startpage.com/ (proxied google result)
- spodek 13y agoGoogle's strategy is to profit from advertising. It fundamentally benefits from knowing as much about its users as possible. Every tactic it has will always support that strategy or it will risk failure. You can tell its strategy motivates it toward evil (its term, not mine), because its slogan is "Don't be evil." It chose that slogan because it risks being evil, in its own terms. It doesn't need a slogan like "Don't be unprofitable" or "Don't break the law" because its strategy doesn't point it in those directions. It points to being evil, in its terms. Why else would a company feel so compelled to stop itself from doing evil than to make its most prominent slogan to stop itself? If its strategy didn't point it in that direction, why else would it try to stop itself from stopping being "evil"? All the brilliance of its engineers, managers, leaders, deals, and so on exists to support the company's strategy, which it realizes motivates them so much toward "evil" it has to stop itself as its highest or at least most public directive. "Don't be evil" exists to make the place palatable to humans who understand the company's direction. Who made the slogan? The people who know the company's direction best. They know it better than you and they realize its direction. Google has a technically superior product to its competitors. When you realize its most knowledgeable and powerful employees know its strategy points it to "be evil", you realize why people use alternatives whose strategies don't point them to "evil," especially when current events highlight the consequences of its strategic choice of knowing so much about you, its users.
- gyardley 13y agoWhatever you feel about Google's actions, there's no need to concoct elaborate stories around and speculative theories about the origin of Google's 'don't be evil' slogan. You can look it up. According to http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-07-16-n55.html http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-07-16-n55.html, the 'don't be evil' slogan came from Paul Buchheit, who was brand-new to the company when he proposed it at a corporate-values brainstorming meeting. This meeting was before Google became an advertising company, and Paul intended the slogan to be funny, and a jab at other companies.
- ronaldx 13y agoI agree with the parent commenter: the fact that "don't be evil" was adopted suggests strongly that there is a motivation to be evil that needed to be overcome (and that users could identify with). The company storytelling that goes along with the slogan doesn't matter, and nor does it matter that it's intended mainly as a jab at competitors in the same industry.
- Yrlec 13y agoI am one of those that have changed to DDG after the scandals. So far it feels like I find my results as quickly as I used to do with Google. One nice feature that I just found: under the Privacy tab at https://duckduckgo.com/settings https://duckduckgo.com/settings you can change so that the query is sent as a HTTP POST parameter instead of a GET parameter. That way your ISP can't find out what you are searching for (assuming you have https enabled).
- chrj 13y agoIt shouldn't matter if you are using GET or POST - how would your ISP find out anything about your request if you are using HTTPS?
- Yrlec 13y agoYou are correct, I was drawing the wrong conclusions from how the HTTP headers are sent. It doesn't affect how much info the ISP gets. However, POST parameters are somewhat more secure, since less info about your query is cached by your browser: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/198462/is-either-get-or-post-more-secure-than-the-other http://stackoverflow.com/questions/198462/is-either-get-or-p...
- Kiro 13y agoI hope people are aware of the fact that DDG does not have its own index and is using Bing under the hood.
- m-r-a-m 13y ago"DuckDuckGo gets its results from over one hundred sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, which are stored in our own index), Yahoo! (through BOSS), WolframAlpha, Bing, and Yandex." [1] [1] http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-sources http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...
- dnda 13y agoFor some reason they never say what percentage of (unique)queries are answered by which source though...
- crazedpsyc 13y agoBecause it varies widely :). It is entirely based on your query -- whichever source is detected as best for that type of query (i.e. Yandex is better at handling symbols, Bing's advanced syntax is better [mostly]), and of course it changes over time as rules are tweaked and added.
- acdha 13y agoThe DuckDuckBot in my logs would beg to differ with you
- senthilnayagam 13y agoI changed my default search engine on safari to DDG, am I happy, no but willing to give them a chance and also using other search sources(github) for my purposes
- craigching 13y agoOn mobile safari you can't change the search engine (that I know of), so I've switched to the Mercury browser which does allow me to use DDG. I'm actually quite happy with Mercury, it's a snappy little browser with a good feature set!
- Revisor 13y agoYou can change the search engine if you liberate/jailbreak your device.
- jusben1369 13y agoA "pro PRISM" headline might read "Less than 0.0X% searches move to search engines that don't track individuals despite apparent outcry over PRISM"
- thrownaway2424 13y agoGoogle has more information security engineers than ddg has all engineers. Same goes for Facebook and Microsoft. What makes HN think the NSA and/or China and/or Somali pirates haven't completely owned every server at ddg? Why do you think that just because ddg doesn't log anything implies that your ddg accesses aren't logged by third parties?
- bconway 13y agoAny evidence or just FUD?
- thrownaway2424 13y agoJust FUD, but I don't think it's sufficient to /intend/ to protect user data, you must also have the /capability/ to actually protect it.
- ctide 13y agoI actually switched to DuckDuckGo because the Chrome team decided to make using a Google a worse experience than using any other search engine in the latest beta client. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=230607 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=230607 Unfortunately, DuckDuckGo results are way worse than Google from what I can tell so I still end up frequently going back and searching Google for things :(
- llamataboot 13y agoYou can search from DDG by appending !g to your search
- mehmehshoe 13y agoNow if they would just offer free email....hint.
- api 13y agoI've been using it. It's a pretty decent search engine, but doesn't do quite as good a job as Google at prioritizing "canonical" content and finding the right entry points to things. Sometimes it'll land you deep in a relevant site but not at the front page, for example. I have found one area that it seems to sometimes outshine Google: finding really obscure stuff. Google seems to be biased so hard toward more popular/stable/canonical content that it sometimes seems to overlook things when you really are looking for something weird, or a needle in a haystack. Try using DuckDuckGo to find some ultra-obscure reference. This is interesting as Google's index is almost certainly much larger... so it's got to be a PageRank artifact.
- programminggeek 13y agoThis is absolutely what happens when you find a successful long-play strategy and position yourself right. DDG is probably never going to be as big as Google, but it doesn't need to be. There is likely a growing group of people that doesn't so much like the idea of Google tracking them down and using their information for other things, or governments getting that information. A small portion of a huge audience could likely be millions, certainly enough to support a business, even if it's not a huge business.
- telcodud 13y agoWhat's DDG's business model?
- nhangen 13y agoReally wanted to like DDG, and went as far as changing default SE for Chrome this week, but I couldn't hack it for more than a few days. The results page is very difficult on the eyes, and the design hierarchy is very rough. Google is just light years ahead. I'm going back to Google with Incognito and AdBlock for now.
- claudius 13y agoYou can greatly customise the layout of the results page, and even store these customisations in the GET parameters, i.e. your browser’s search engine settings.
- myko 13y agoAre incognito and AdBlock meant to protect against PRISM? I don't quite understand what the point is. Why not just log out if you're still using Google anyway?
- nhangen 13y agoIncognito and AdBlock might not protect against Prism, but they protect me from other sites. Logging out is an option as well, which is something I'm considering, though I doubt it matters much since they know me by IP and I use Gmail.
- adamconroy 13y agoI think google still associates searches with 'you' even if you are logged out, via cookies, browser/os/ip fingerprint.
- mileszs 13y agoI am still having a hard time with it. However, you might try the "Lite" version: https://duckduckgo.com/lite/ https://duckduckgo.com/lite/
- Uhhrrr 13y agoAlso, the teletype version: https://duckduckgo.com/tty/ https://duckduckgo.com/tty/
- quattrofan 13y agoAm I missing something here but how does this help? Its still based in the US.
- gesman 13y agoBrown cookie for the effort, but i have exactly 0% of hits coming from duckduckgo to any of my sites. It's good alternative search engine though as Google becoming increasingly opinionated and rattled by inconsistent changes with never ending improvements to their algorithms.
- Zergy 13y agoI used GDG for a while and there is one feature that it doesn't have that Google has that makes it very hard to convert. I can google "soap" and the first result is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP. If I GDG "soap" the results are all about bars of soap. Nothing I have tried even comes close to competing with Google Search trained fror me when it comes to search relevance.
- harshadura 13y agolol
- Meza 13y agoI tried using DDG a while ago. For most things it worked fine, but my biggest (only real) issue with it came when searching for solutions to technical problems. For example, say I'm programming and I run into some obscure error message generated by some 3rd party library. From what I remember, DDG (in general) tended to require more fine tuning of the search query than Google in order to find in order for me to find the information I was looking for. Unfortunately I can't think of an example of the top of my head, as this was awhile ago. edit: Another example: Say I remember an obscure forum post from months ago. Which search engine is more likely to find it? DDG is great, but it still needs to improve somewhat in these areas before I switch over to it entirely.
- panacea 13y agoI use DDG, but whenever I have the sort of search intent you outline, I simply append !g and search Google instead. It's also easier for me to use DDG and append !gi to look at images, rather than run a Google search and then switch to image search.
- nsxwolf 13y agoI have a strange phobia. Even though I think I have an understanding of how Google works, I have this (irrational?) belief that no matter what I do Google can see it. That somehow, someway, even if I use DuckDuckGo, Google is aware of it and tracking me anyway. Sometimes I see an ad on the internet that seems relevant to a private, in person conversation I had with someone, and that same "Google feeling" washes over me.
- adamconroy 13y agoI love DuckDuckGo, but there is one problem, the search results are generally poor. I have to revert to google very regularly to find what I want, particularly for technical searches. I am going to persist, but at this stage I am limiting it to things I don't want on my permanent record, like when I am searching for things like 'herpes'.
- bannerbuzz 13y agoReally very informative information about DUCKDUCKGO sees