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You forgot the most vital reason: They respect your privacy. I personally believe it's indeed worth wasting some extra energy while searching, in order to get t
by a1a 13y ago
You forgot the most vital reason: They respect your privacy. I personally believe it's indeed worth wasting some extra energy while searching, in order to get that respect. Not to mention it's constantly getting better. I have used DDG as my primary search eninge for the last year, and seen significant improvement.
- nfoz 13y agoDisagree, I don't think their inferior search results have anything to do with tracking/privacy concerns. It's just an inferior (meta-)crawler (they don't do the crawling themselves). Crawling/weighting is extremely expensive, and it doesn't seem that anyone puts in nearly as much effort to this as Google. DDG simply don't have the resources to do so. Edit: I should point out that DDG has been my primary search engine for a year, and for most searches its results are great or at least decent enough to answer my question. I fallback to google for fuzzier queries, e.g. when I don't know what I'm looking for.
- a1a 13y agoYou do have a point. But I think you underestimate the power of knowing "who is asking the question". Take the search term "String" for example, the one searching might refer to "String" in (1) programming, (2) physics, (3) music, (4) clothing ... the list goes on. Let's say you know the one searching refers to (1), even here you will be better off, knowing if the one searching wants to know about the string class in Java, C++, C# or whatever.. This might be a bad example, but you get the idea. The better you know the one searching the better results you will be able to provide.
- claudius 13y agoIt is easy to add this information in the search – in the particular example, adding ‘Java’ will likely mean that someone is not looking for specific strings from a tropical island or the local clothing types, but your ‘type 1’ strings. Even better, the same person can look for clothing by adding an appropriate identifier, without having to worry that ‘type 1’ answers leak into their ‘type 4’ query.
- BitMastro 13y agoI personally value a better service way more than my privacy, but everyone has the right to make their own choices, I guess.
- a1a 13y agoIndeed. Do you also keep a list of your sexual preferences, political views, medical history, etc? If so I would recommend giving this to every corporation you interact with. I mean, the odds are some of them might be able to improve their services, in some manner, using this information. Even if just one out of ten would be able to, it would be worth it, right? Since privacy doesn't really matter.
- BitMastro 13y agoYou are acting irrationally. You give the information if you think it can be useful to provide a better service. Otherwise you have the means to withdraw from sharing information and you are supposed use them. By that I mean that, if you value your privacy and don't trust another company to keep your confidential information private, why would you trust another company to keep from collecting your information? Just don't give it in the first place! There are throwaway accounts on forums like HN and reddit, private browsing, VPNs and anonymous remailers if you need them, but, if you don't need them, that's just noise slowing you down. Other thoughts that are directly related to the matter in question are that it shouldn't be a problem that a company knows my sexual preferences, political views and medical history, it could be a problem if that information is shared with someone else, or used against me by that company. Second note, my confidential information should, in a perfect world, be of no matter to anyone. No company, person or government should be allowed to judge someone basing on those characteristics instead of skill, compatibility or lawfulness. It is not the case, unfortunately, but this is the reason why privacy does matter, it's because we don't live in a perfect world.
- a1a 13y agoI am confused. First you describe privacy precautions as "noise slowing you down", a few arguments later you have reached the conclusion "this is the reason why privacy matter".
- tlrobinson 13y agoI set DDG as my default search engine a couple weeks ago. At least 25% of the time I give up and use Google. I've even started instinctively switching to Google for certain searches I know DDG will fail on (particularly technical stuff)
- chimeracoder 13y agoTry prepending !s to your searches when needed in DuckDuckGo. That will send results through StartPage, which will return you Google's results, but through a proxy (mitigating the privacy loss by using Google).
- avree 13y agoSerious question—why would I use DuckDuckGo to use StartPage to use Google? If I was really privacy conscious, I could go straight to StartPage. If I didn't really care, I could go straight to Google. Where does DDG fit in?
- imperialWicket 13y agoIt's a front-end that gives you one entry point for StartPage, Google, Weather, IMDB, Amazon, [entire bang support list]. Just a search = "keyword list" I want Google search = "!g keyword list" I want Google Finance Search = "!gf keyword list" I want Amazon products search = "!a keyword list" No one else gives you this much freedom to coherently pass your request directly where you want it to go (AND while respecting the fact that you don't want others to know what you're searching).
- tlrobinson 13y ago"No one else gives you this much freedom to coherently pass your request directly where you want it to go" Chrome has this built in, with the added benefit of not unnecessarily sending your searches through a 3rd party, and you can add your own custom searches, and set custom shortcuts.