14 ms·

Gnome's Web Browser Ditches Google For DuckDuckGo

226 points by jeena 13y ago

chatman 13y ago
Very welcome step. User privacy should be of utmost importance for all GNU/Linux distros. Unfortunately, users of Ubuntu are subjected to privacy intruding malware (that sends their queries to Amazon). Its about time the distros followed GNOME's step and override Firefox's default search engine to DDG as well.
- hkmurakami 13y ago
  I'm a new Ubuntu user who's not super savvy but am considerinng moving to another distro due to these malware issues. Which distro would you recommend I move to? Mint?
  - wfn 13y ago
    Depends, I guess. I'd check out Debian and maybe, yes, Mint. The thing to realize is that you can use any kind of desktop environment on any of the main distros. With Ubuntu, moving from its default DE can sometimes result in certain hiccups. Other distros are more DE-modular; that's the feeling I get when working on a Debian desktop, at least. Overall, Debian is a very user-friendly system (or rather, it exposes the same kinds of interfaces as Ubuntu does, once the leaky UI abstractions in Ubuntu do start leaking. ;)
  - ewzimm 13y ago
    Ubuntu GNOME
  - zachlatta 13y ago
    I highly, highly recommend Linux Mint (with Cinnamon) to those looking for an Ubuntu alternative. Cinnamon is a great desktop environment and Mint, in many ways, is Ubuntu without the privacy issues.
    - sampo 13y ago
      As far as I have understood, the default way to upgrade the distro in Mint is to reinstall the whole OS? Feels a bit primitive to me. You're fine for a year or so, but when a new version of Mint comes, if you want to upgrade, you'd need to reinstall everything.
      - zachlatta 13y ago
        I'm not entirely sure how the upgrade process works in Mint. I think of it as a "transition" distro in many ways. Most of the people I've recommended it to moved on to Crunchbang or similar after a few months of use.
    - consider_this 13y ago
      How about Mint search? http://www.linuxmint.com/searchengines.php http://www.linuxmint.com/searchengines.php
  - sampo 13y ago
    The easiest thing would be to just turn off the internet search option from the dash, or maybe uninstall the Amazon lens (but maybe there are other similar lenses...). Or change from Unity to another Desktop Environment (Gnome, Xfce, KDE, Cinnamon or whatever). Unless you want to make a statement, then changing the distro might be the gesture you want.
    - hkmurakami 13y ago
      oh good to know that as a Gnome user, I'm at least minimally "in the clear". Thanks! (I thought the malware component might be in a lower level of the OS than the DE)
  - dombili 13y ago
    elementary OS.
  - mintplant 13y ago
    sudo aptitude remove unity-lens-shopping Don't be fooled by the FUD. It's easy to turn off and not that big a deal, but people who are already biased against Ubuntu like to use this to try to scare folks away.
    - zachlatta 13y ago
      Yup, it's easy to remove that specific functionality. But let's think of the big picture. The introduction of this privacy-violating functionality signifies the direction of Ubuntu as a whole.
  - dylz 13y ago
    I've seen http://elementaryos.org/ http://elementaryos.org/ being paraded around a bit, no experiecnce with it tho
- richardwhiuk 13y ago
  "User privacy should be of utmost importance for all GNU/Linux distros." Why? It's a feature which takes a large amount of work to implement, has a series of poor tradeoffs, won't actually increase the size of the user base much, is incredibly hard to do well and is very hard to market to users. Not to mention the fact that a large number of GNU/Linux distros are aimed at markets where such user land improvements are largely immaterial (e.g. on servers). The simple fact is that most users don't care about privacy in the same sense that DDG cares about privacy. If they did, then there would be a huge economic incentive for everyone to make these sorts of changes.
  - hoffcoder 13y ago
    In light of the recent leaks, there is a rising consensus that privacy protection should not be underestimated. If it is, then it is prone to put to use by a third party without taking any permission from the end-user, which is unethical. This is all the more important in the open-source world because many people use open-source products because of their ethical and 'open' paradigms. Proprietary code by their very nature bind us to their whims, but open-source is all about freedom. Even if your hypothesis is true, ie even if most users don't take privacy very seriously today, I bet it is pretty soon going to change.
nilved 13y ago
The newsworthy thing to me is that this hadn't happened already.
overshard 13y ago
I've been using DuckDuckGo for months now and over the past few weeks it's results have gotten considerably better. I wonder if this is because a massive amount of new users are consistently using it overall improving it's results? Overall I think this is a great change though!
- BitMastro 13y ago
  Honest question: if DuckDuckGo doesn't track the users, how can it improve when more users are using it?
  - jvehent 13y ago
    Not tracking the user's personal information doesn't mean you're not tracking the number of clicks, or calculate geoip stats.
    - webdev4242 13y ago
      How is that different from using Google over https without logging in?
      - yk 13y ago
        Google can still track you, cookies are just one example. So DDG uses only the data which can not related to a single user, essentially "users who searched X clicked most often on the second link" while Google builds a profile, that is "the user with cookie value Y usually searches for computers."
      - ams6110 13y ago
        You can dump your google cookies frequently or blacklist google.com from setting cookies.
    - taopao 13y ago
      IIRC DDG was vocally against personalization and "filter bubbling". Even if they collected these stats, they wouldn't be able to refine their results unless they've changed their position.
supermatou 13y ago
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for keeping my private stuff - well, private. But, really, will this matter? I mean, how many people used Gnome's browser in the first place? and how many people, after trying DDG won't simply switch back to Google? Had Gnome's browser been no.1 or no.2 in the browser arena, the gesture may have had some impact (albeit just symbollicaly). But right now... do they think Google would even care/notice?
- knappe 13y ago
  Everything happens one step at a time.
- jeena 13y ago
  I think they are aware of what you're suggesting they wrote: "Then again, knowing the humble size of our userbase, we should let neither our expectations nor our imagination run wild on this front." Still it is the first browser which chooses DDG as its default search engine that I am aware of. This is quite a thing for such a small company like DDG. Now others can follow (or not) when they see that it worked (or not) for Gnome. And even if on Linux more people are aware of the fact that they can change their search engine in the browser, still there is a fair amount who just use what is there. It is therefore browsers nowadays are developed, do sell the default search engine position. I remember the days when IE had 98% of the market share.
  - khill 13y ago
    I remember the days when Netscape Navigator had all the market share. Get off my lawn. :)
    - zanny 13y ago
      But then you consider that in the mid 90s, the raw number of devices regularly running Netscape Navigator was probably on par with todays usage statistics of Opera.
      - 13y ago
Aldo_MX 13y ago
Kudos to DDG :)
anxiousest 13y ago
I have nothing against the entities involved but reading the comments here I get the impression that many simply ignored the "cooperation" bit i.e: Cooperation: It's been some time now since we were first contacted by DuckDuckGo regarding the possibility to partner with them in order to share a percentage of the revenue that they make from the traffic originated on their search engine links ... So DDG made a deal they could afford and got their partner to hold water for them and link to one of their PR websites, they've been ramping up their marketing efforts to try and capitalize on certain fears, which I suppose is logical. Generally speaking I think ddg went with the "we don't store data" route because it's the niche they were left with and that ultimately means their search won't improve beyond a certain point.
- andyroid 13y ago
  "Generally speaking I think ddg went with the "we don't store data" route because it's the niche they were left with and that ultimately means that their search won't improve beyond a certain point." As they will all be too busy not storing peoples data, or how does this line of reasoning work?
  - s3r3nity 13y ago
    Search is based upon machine learning algorithms that use stored data as signals. Google is not only REALLY good at what they do BECAUSE of the amount of data they have on the individual doing the searching, but the benefits of machine learning are that they will get even BETTER as more and more data is incorporated and stored. Without proper machine learning on the individual level, DDG will never improve beyond a point. They're already kind of shitty, and even if they get millions of more queries they won't be able to improve at the rate that Google does. It's a trade-off ('privacy' vs. 'quality') that 95% of the world doesn't give a shit about. Therefore I see this sort of move to DDG as just short-sighted and unreasonable overall.
    - nfoz 13y ago
      Note that DDG is small enough that they're not even doing their search crawling/aggregation. They have to rely on garbage data they get from Yahoo and other crawlers. Their quality, I think, is much less from the lack of smart machine learning algos, as it is their lack of funds in not being able to afford to crawl the web.
milesf 13y ago
I've switched from Google and Chrome to DDG and Firefox. Very happy with the switch. I've started recommending to my non-techie relatives to switch as well. We've seen this sort of thing before. I've gone from no search engines, to Webcrawler, to Lycos, to AltaVista, to Google, and now DuckDuckGo. No biggie.
- teaneedz 13y ago
  I've made the exact same switch. I'm loving the combination of FF & DDG. I've also set DDG as the default search engine in Chrome and use it on iOS from the app and Mercury browser. DuckDuckGo deserves all the great publicity it's receiving.
  - ams6110 13y ago
    DDG is my default search engine, I do find myself needing to occasionally throw in !g if I'm not finding what I'm looking for. Results are generally decent though, and the trend seems to be that they are getting better and better (though I have not objectively measured that in any way). The other ! shortcuts are worth reviewing, as they can dramatically improve the results if you're doing a focused search.
    - teaneedz 13y ago
      So true. One of the nice things about the !bang syntax is that it's pretty intuitive. Although one can accomplish something similar in the browser via smart keywords, the DDG way lets anyone jump right on to any machine and focus a search on a particular site. By picking the first letter or a two letter combination, e.g. !hn=hackernews, I don't have to look up the exact !bang for a site.
- bsullivan01 13y ago
  Same here, FF and DDG. Might have to use Bing or Google a few times but Google isn't /wasn't perfect on every search either. I now do get referrals from DDG on a few on my websites so anecdotally and from a very small sample I see the increase. Google has become very commercialized and too tied up with the FED big boys now.
benbristow 13y ago
DuckDuckGo is great. I always end up after a while using Google though as I find Google generally has better results and I enjoy the 'sort in the last...' functions for example that DDG lacks.
burmask 13y ago
Gnome is not a popular browser, but every little bit matters.
- yeukhon 13y ago
  This is stupid. Someone downvoted you just because you called it not a popular browser. Man. HN is becoming shit.
  - brokenparser 13y ago
    It's more likely because Gnome != a web browser.
    - yeukhon 13y ago
      That's playing word Nazi.
      - brokenparser 13y ago
        No it's not because it's bleeding obvious. You could have known by just looking at the title.
jlgreco 13y ago
Why the hell does Gnome even have a webbrowser? Projects that are dedicated to working on webbrowsers fuck it up often enough... Whatever, good for them I guess. I wonder if would have noticed if not for this article.
- qq66 13y ago
  A built-in browser is the best way to download the browser of your choice.
  - BCM43 13y ago
    No, the package management system on just about every distribution running gnome is the best way. A web browser is a good way to get info on why the package manage is broken though.
  - tuananh 13y ago
    You're talking about IE6, amirite?
- aestra 13y ago
  KDE has a web browser too, Konqueror which uses KHTML and KJS which then Apple forked into Webkit to use in Safari. Google then got into the Webkit action with Chrome. Now Google is forking Webkit itself. So yes, nothing good ever comes out of rarely used web browsers.
- magicalist 13y ago
  The Web browser is WebKit via WebKitGTK+ (the reference is a little oblique, but it's mentioned in the article, or you could do a basic search), so no need to fret over other people working on a browser you don't even use.
- brokenparser 13y ago
  Because Web adheres to the human interface guidelines.
unclebucknasty 13y ago
I immediately feel "freer" just reading this. I have heard of DDG intermittently, but never remember to try it out with any consistency. I generally have my default browser page set to about:blank, but I just updated it to DDG. Maybe that will prompt me to try it for a while. But, here's the thing: As an avid Android user (phones and tablets), it feels a little "insufficient" to just switch over my search engine in the name of privacy. After all, I use the big G for nav, contacts, and other stuff. Of course, it is easy to use their sevices by default, and I don't know what a viable alternative stack woukd look like. I disabled Verizon's Navigator because its click agreement seemed at least as onerous as what I have seen from G. So, even in trying to find alternatives, it does bring up the questions: to whom am I willing to provide my info, how much am I willing to provide, and in exchange for what?
- Derbasti 13y ago
  It is relatively easy to run your own contacts/calendar server. Just buy a Raspberry Pi, set up DynDNS, and hit apt-get install owncloud. This is really the way to go here. Also, there are plenty of email providers out there that are not Google (but it is often unclear whether they are any better privacy-wise. Also, arguably, no one is providing as slick a web interface for email as Google). I am not living in the US, so it makes sense for me to choose an email provider in my own country. Mapping is more difficult. Tomtom etc. have great navigation apps. But if you just want to look at a map, GMaps is still far superior to most OSM based map apps. Skobbler has a few great ones.
  - bad_user 13y ago
    Depends on where you live. In my city and its surroundings, OSM data is far better than GMaps. And on my Android I paid for both OsmAnd and Skobbler. These aren't as polished as Gmaps, but at least they work offline.
eloff 13y ago
This is trading imagined harm for a real harm. You trade off a loss of privacy that has zero practical implications currently for almost everyone (a few terrorist suspects might have to worry) against lost time due to inferior search result quality. I don't follow the logic. It seems like idealism for the sake of idealism to me.
- thrownaway2424 13y ago
  Worse than that. It's trading a known bad thing (DDG's worse search results quality) for an imaginary privacy benefit.
- fhd2 13y ago
  > This is trading imagined harm for a real harm. You trade off a loss of privacy that has zero practical implications currently for almost everyone (a few terrorist suspects might have to worry) against lost time due to inferior search result quality. So you argue that slightly inferior search results are "real harm" and mass surveillance is "imagined harm"? I'm afraid we don't agree on the definition of the word "harm". Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, eh?
  - superuser2 13y ago
    Mass surveillance is watching everything and fishing for illegal activity. That is not the same as filing subpoenas for data on persons of interest. If you think everything that generates records the government can eventually access is "real harm," what exactly are you doing on HN?
    - fhd2 13y ago
      > Mass surveillance is watching everything and fishing for illegal activity. That is not the same as filing subpoenas for data on persons of interest. There are several cases of exactly that, fishing people's online movement profiles for illegal activity, e.g.: http://www.digitaltrends.com/lifestyle/googling-how-to-murder/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/lifestyle/googling-how-to-murde... > If you think everything that generates records the government can eventually access is "real harm," what exactly are you doing on HN? I post my comments knowing full well that anyone can read them. I do not think my web browsing and searching behaviour is quite the same thing. I cannot decide what to share and what not. To come up with a stupid analogy, it's like saying: "If you don't like being watched, why do you go to the supermarket?" It's not the same as being watched in my bedroom.
cromwellian 13y ago
The filter bubble thing is overstated. There are times when you want a filter bubble, when you found a piece of information and want to dig deeper on related subjects, a "conversational" interface that has at least short term memory offers big benefits. Do you really want to ask questions to an entity which acts like it has anterograde amnesia? Can you imagine Captain Picard having to continue to remind the computer of the enterprise about context? Google's 'long term memory' offers lots of benefits too, and 90% of the time, the filter bubble is the correct answer. Like when I search for a particular business on the desktop, and then later I search on my mobile device in Google Maps, and the very first auto-suggest after typing 1-2 characters it the business I searched for yesterday. This is awesome given how irritating it is to enter stuff on mobile devices, especially when in motion, the fewer characters typed the better. Most of the privacy issues can be solved just by opening up an incognito window. You can choose with 1 stroke whether you want a bubble or not.
- fetbaffe 13y ago
  Captain Picard definitely lives in a filter bubble. So many times he has been fooled by the bad guy is just embarrassing.
- teaneedz 13y ago
  Personally, I prefer this: [DuckDuckGo Privacy](https://duckduckgo.com/privacy https://duckduckgo.com/privacy) To this: [Incognito mode (browse in private) - Chrome Help](https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95464?hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95464?hl=en) Sometimes it's better to pay the price of a few extra characters to retain some control.
  - coob 13y ago
    http://ddg.gg http://ddg.gg <- fewer chars
    - andyking 13y ago
      And a domain from Guernsey, who are unlikely to mess around with things. It always baffles me when I see startups using things like Libyan (.ly) and even Syrian (.sy) domains to make some cutesy word.
Kiro 13y ago
Time to stop using the Gnome browser then.
DigitalSea 13y ago
I think the NSA have proven if a particular data provider (in this case Google) doesn't agree or can't provide the info the NSA wants, the NSA have the capabilities to sniff the traffic on a multitude of levels. Privacy is an illusion, but I can attest to the fact DuckDuckGo is the more secure option.
- ok_craig 13y ago
  ...how?
MOB98 13y ago
Email him rincon.vivian@yahoo.com
ubojan 13y ago
This might be workable for some people, I tried DDG and results aren't on the same level. DDG is getting better every day, until then my temporary solution is using "Google proxy" (anonymised Google search) like https://startpage.com/ https://startpage.com/.
fedvasu 13y ago
DuckDuckGo is nothing but a bing front-end. I do not see an upside with this switch, so basically, you are making M$ more stronger on Web. I am not being snarky, I am concerned.Google is evil sure, but is M$ better?
- fedvasu 13y ago
  No seriously, tell me[with citation] that it is not bing front-end. I am all for it.
  - rickr 13y ago
    I think they may have gotten their data from bing in the past but these days it looks like that isn't the case. https://dukgo.com/help/en_US/results/sources https://dukgo.com/help/en_US/results/sources
icantthinkofone 13y ago
Bad move. It creates an extra step in the installation process. It forces users to then reset it back to Google search, which most everyone will do. Just like when you reset Bing in IE to Google.

226 points by jeena 13y ago

Very welcome step. User privacy should be of utmost importance for all GNU/Linux distros. Unfortunately, users of Ubuntu are subjected to privacy intruding malware (that sends their queries to Amazon). Its about time the distros followed GNOME's step and override Firefox's default search engine to DDG as well.

hkmurakami 13y ago
I'm a new Ubuntu user who's not super savvy but am considerinng moving to another distro due to these malware issues. Which distro would you recommend I move to? Mint?
- wfn 13y ago
  Depends, I guess. I'd check out Debian and maybe, yes, Mint. The thing to realize is that you can use any kind of desktop environment on any of the main distros. With Ubuntu, moving from its default DE can sometimes result in certain hiccups. Other distros are more DE-modular; that's the feeling I get when working on a Debian desktop, at least. Overall, Debian is a very user-friendly system (or rather, it exposes the same kinds of interfaces as Ubuntu does, once the leaky UI abstractions in Ubuntu do start leaking. ;)
- ewzimm 13y ago
  Ubuntu GNOME
- zachlatta 13y ago
  I highly, highly recommend Linux Mint (with Cinnamon) to those looking for an Ubuntu alternative. Cinnamon is a great desktop environment and Mint, in many ways, is Ubuntu without the privacy issues.
  - sampo 13y ago
    As far as I have understood, the default way to upgrade the distro in Mint is to reinstall the whole OS? Feels a bit primitive to me. You're fine for a year or so, but when a new version of Mint comes, if you want to upgrade, you'd need to reinstall everything.
    - zachlatta 13y ago
      I'm not entirely sure how the upgrade process works in Mint. I think of it as a "transition" distro in many ways. Most of the people I've recommended it to moved on to Crunchbang or similar after a few months of use.
  - consider_this 13y ago
    How about Mint search? http://www.linuxmint.com/searchengines.php http://www.linuxmint.com/searchengines.php
- sampo 13y ago
  The easiest thing would be to just turn off the internet search option from the dash, or maybe uninstall the Amazon lens (but maybe there are other similar lenses...). Or change from Unity to another Desktop Environment (Gnome, Xfce, KDE, Cinnamon or whatever). Unless you want to make a statement, then changing the distro might be the gesture you want.
  - hkmurakami 13y ago
    oh good to know that as a Gnome user, I'm at least minimally "in the clear". Thanks! (I thought the malware component might be in a lower level of the OS than the DE)
- dombili 13y ago
  elementary OS.
- mintplant 13y ago
  sudo aptitude remove unity-lens-shopping Don't be fooled by the FUD. It's easy to turn off and not that big a deal, but people who are already biased against Ubuntu like to use this to try to scare folks away.
  - zachlatta 13y ago
    Yup, it's easy to remove that specific functionality. But let's think of the big picture. The introduction of this privacy-violating functionality signifies the direction of Ubuntu as a whole.
- dylz 13y ago
  I've seen http://elementaryos.org/ http://elementaryos.org/ being paraded around a bit, no experiecnce with it tho
richardwhiuk 13y ago
"User privacy should be of utmost importance for all GNU/Linux distros." Why? It's a feature which takes a large amount of work to implement, has a series of poor tradeoffs, won't actually increase the size of the user base much, is incredibly hard to do well and is very hard to market to users. Not to mention the fact that a large number of GNU/Linux distros are aimed at markets where such user land improvements are largely immaterial (e.g. on servers). The simple fact is that most users don't care about privacy in the same sense that DDG cares about privacy. If they did, then there would be a huge economic incentive for everyone to make these sorts of changes.
- hoffcoder 13y ago
  In light of the recent leaks, there is a rising consensus that privacy protection should not be underestimated. If it is, then it is prone to put to use by a third party without taking any permission from the end-user, which is unethical. This is all the more important in the open-source world because many people use open-source products because of their ethical and 'open' paradigms. Proprietary code by their very nature bind us to their whims, but open-source is all about freedom. Even if your hypothesis is true, ie even if most users don't take privacy very seriously today, I bet it is pretty soon going to change.

nilved 13y ago

The newsworthy thing to me is that this hadn't happened already.

overshard 13y ago

I've been using DuckDuckGo for months now and over the past few weeks it's results have gotten considerably better. I wonder if this is because a massive amount of new users are consistently using it overall improving it's results? Overall I think this is a great change though!

BitMastro 13y ago
Honest question: if DuckDuckGo doesn't track the users, how can it improve when more users are using it?
- jvehent 13y ago
  Not tracking the user's personal information doesn't mean you're not tracking the number of clicks, or calculate geoip stats.
  - webdev4242 13y ago
    How is that different from using Google over https without logging in?
    - yk 13y ago
      Google can still track you, cookies are just one example. So DDG uses only the data which can not related to a single user, essentially "users who searched X clicked most often on the second link" while Google builds a profile, that is "the user with cookie value Y usually searches for computers."
    - ams6110 13y ago
      You can dump your google cookies frequently or blacklist google.com from setting cookies.
  - taopao 13y ago
    IIRC DDG was vocally against personalization and "filter bubbling". Even if they collected these stats, they wouldn't be able to refine their results unless they've changed their position.

supermatou 13y ago

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for keeping my private stuff - well, private. But, really, will this matter? I mean, how many people used Gnome's browser in the first place? and how many people, after trying DDG won't simply switch back to Google? Had Gnome's browser been no.1 or no.2 in the browser arena, the gesture may have had some impact (albeit just symbollicaly). But right now... do they think Google would even care/notice?

knappe 13y ago
Everything happens one step at a time.
jeena 13y ago
I think they are aware of what you're suggesting they wrote: "Then again, knowing the humble size of our userbase, we should let neither our expectations nor our imagination run wild on this front." Still it is the first browser which chooses DDG as its default search engine that I am aware of. This is quite a thing for such a small company like DDG. Now others can follow (or not) when they see that it worked (or not) for Gnome. And even if on Linux more people are aware of the fact that they can change their search engine in the browser, still there is a fair amount who just use what is there. It is therefore browsers nowadays are developed, do sell the default search engine position. I remember the days when IE had 98% of the market share.
- khill 13y ago
  I remember the days when Netscape Navigator had all the market share. Get off my lawn. :)
  - zanny 13y ago
    But then you consider that in the mid 90s, the raw number of devices regularly running Netscape Navigator was probably on par with todays usage statistics of Opera.
    - 13y ago

Aldo_MX 13y ago

Kudos to DDG :)

anxiousest 13y ago

I have nothing against the entities involved but reading the comments here I get the impression that many simply ignored the "cooperation" bit i.e: Cooperation: It's been some time now since we were first contacted by DuckDuckGo regarding the possibility to partner with them in order to share a percentage of the revenue that they make from the traffic originated on their search engine links ... So DDG made a deal they could afford and got their partner to hold water for them and link to one of their PR websites, they've been ramping up their marketing efforts to try and capitalize on certain fears, which I suppose is logical. Generally speaking I think ddg went with the "we don't store data" route because it's the niche they were left with and that ultimately means their search won't improve beyond a certain point.

andyroid 13y ago
"Generally speaking I think ddg went with the "we don't store data" route because it's the niche they were left with and that ultimately means that their search won't improve beyond a certain point." As they will all be too busy not storing peoples data, or how does this line of reasoning work?
- s3r3nity 13y ago
  Search is based upon machine learning algorithms that use stored data as signals. Google is not only REALLY good at what they do BECAUSE of the amount of data they have on the individual doing the searching, but the benefits of machine learning are that they will get even BETTER as more and more data is incorporated and stored. Without proper machine learning on the individual level, DDG will never improve beyond a point. They're already kind of shitty, and even if they get millions of more queries they won't be able to improve at the rate that Google does. It's a trade-off ('privacy' vs. 'quality') that 95% of the world doesn't give a shit about. Therefore I see this sort of move to DDG as just short-sighted and unreasonable overall.
  - nfoz 13y ago
    Note that DDG is small enough that they're not even doing their search crawling/aggregation. They have to rely on garbage data they get from Yahoo and other crawlers. Their quality, I think, is much less from the lack of smart machine learning algos, as it is their lack of funds in not being able to afford to crawl the web.

milesf 13y ago

I've switched from Google and Chrome to DDG and Firefox. Very happy with the switch. I've started recommending to my non-techie relatives to switch as well. We've seen this sort of thing before. I've gone from no search engines, to Webcrawler, to Lycos, to AltaVista, to Google, and now DuckDuckGo. No biggie.

teaneedz 13y ago
I've made the exact same switch. I'm loving the combination of FF & DDG. I've also set DDG as the default search engine in Chrome and use it on iOS from the app and Mercury browser. DuckDuckGo deserves all the great publicity it's receiving.
- ams6110 13y ago
  DDG is my default search engine, I do find myself needing to occasionally throw in !g if I'm not finding what I'm looking for. Results are generally decent though, and the trend seems to be that they are getting better and better (though I have not objectively measured that in any way). The other ! shortcuts are worth reviewing, as they can dramatically improve the results if you're doing a focused search.
  - teaneedz 13y ago
    So true. One of the nice things about the !bang syntax is that it's pretty intuitive. Although one can accomplish something similar in the browser via smart keywords, the DDG way lets anyone jump right on to any machine and focus a search on a particular site. By picking the first letter or a two letter combination, e.g. !hn=hackernews, I don't have to look up the exact !bang for a site.
bsullivan01 13y ago
Same here, FF and DDG. Might have to use Bing or Google a few times but Google isn't /wasn't perfect on every search either. I now do get referrals from DDG on a few on my websites so anecdotally and from a very small sample I see the increase. Google has become very commercialized and too tied up with the FED big boys now.

benbristow 13y ago

DuckDuckGo is great. I always end up after a while using Google though as I find Google generally has better results and I enjoy the 'sort in the last...' functions for example that DDG lacks.

burmask 13y ago

Gnome is not a popular browser, but every little bit matters.

yeukhon 13y ago
This is stupid. Someone downvoted you just because you called it not a popular browser. Man. HN is becoming shit.
- brokenparser 13y ago
  It's more likely because Gnome != a web browser.
  - yeukhon 13y ago
    That's playing word Nazi.
    - brokenparser 13y ago
      No it's not because it's bleeding obvious. You could have known by just looking at the title.

jlgreco 13y ago

Why the hell does Gnome even have a webbrowser? Projects that are dedicated to working on webbrowsers fuck it up often enough... Whatever, good for them I guess. I wonder if would have noticed if not for this article.

qq66 13y ago
A built-in browser is the best way to download the browser of your choice.
- BCM43 13y ago
  No, the package management system on just about every distribution running gnome is the best way. A web browser is a good way to get info on why the package manage is broken though.
- tuananh 13y ago
  You're talking about IE6, amirite?
aestra 13y ago
KDE has a web browser too, Konqueror which uses KHTML and KJS which then Apple forked into Webkit to use in Safari. Google then got into the Webkit action with Chrome. Now Google is forking Webkit itself. So yes, nothing good ever comes out of rarely used web browsers.
magicalist 13y ago
The Web browser is WebKit via WebKitGTK+ (the reference is a little oblique, but it's mentioned in the article, or you could do a basic search), so no need to fret over other people working on a browser you don't even use.
brokenparser 13y ago
Because Web adheres to the human interface guidelines.

unclebucknasty 13y ago

I immediately feel "freer" just reading this. I have heard of DDG intermittently, but never remember to try it out with any consistency. I generally have my default browser page set to about:blank, but I just updated it to DDG. Maybe that will prompt me to try it for a while. But, here's the thing: As an avid Android user (phones and tablets), it feels a little "insufficient" to just switch over my search engine in the name of privacy. After all, I use the big G for nav, contacts, and other stuff. Of course, it is easy to use their sevices by default, and I don't know what a viable alternative stack woukd look like. I disabled Verizon's Navigator because its click agreement seemed at least as onerous as what I have seen from G. So, even in trying to find alternatives, it does bring up the questions: to whom am I willing to provide my info, how much am I willing to provide, and in exchange for what?

Derbasti 13y ago
It is relatively easy to run your own contacts/calendar server. Just buy a Raspberry Pi, set up DynDNS, and hit apt-get install owncloud. This is really the way to go here. Also, there are plenty of email providers out there that are not Google (but it is often unclear whether they are any better privacy-wise. Also, arguably, no one is providing as slick a web interface for email as Google). I am not living in the US, so it makes sense for me to choose an email provider in my own country. Mapping is more difficult. Tomtom etc. have great navigation apps. But if you just want to look at a map, GMaps is still far superior to most OSM based map apps. Skobbler has a few great ones.
- bad_user 13y ago
  Depends on where you live. In my city and its surroundings, OSM data is far better than GMaps. And on my Android I paid for both OsmAnd and Skobbler. These aren't as polished as Gmaps, but at least they work offline.

eloff 13y ago

This is trading imagined harm for a real harm. You trade off a loss of privacy that has zero practical implications currently for almost everyone (a few terrorist suspects might have to worry) against lost time due to inferior search result quality. I don't follow the logic. It seems like idealism for the sake of idealism to me.

thrownaway2424 13y ago
Worse than that. It's trading a known bad thing (DDG's worse search results quality) for an imaginary privacy benefit.
fhd2 13y ago
> This is trading imagined harm for a real harm. You trade off a loss of privacy that has zero practical implications currently for almost everyone (a few terrorist suspects might have to worry) against lost time due to inferior search result quality. So you argue that slightly inferior search results are "real harm" and mass surveillance is "imagined harm"? I'm afraid we don't agree on the definition of the word "harm". Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, eh?
- superuser2 13y ago
  Mass surveillance is watching everything and fishing for illegal activity. That is not the same as filing subpoenas for data on persons of interest. If you think everything that generates records the government can eventually access is "real harm," what exactly are you doing on HN?
  - fhd2 13y ago
    > Mass surveillance is watching everything and fishing for illegal activity. That is not the same as filing subpoenas for data on persons of interest. There are several cases of exactly that, fishing people's online movement profiles for illegal activity, e.g.: http://www.digitaltrends.com/lifestyle/googling-how-to-murder/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/lifestyle/googling-how-to-murde... > If you think everything that generates records the government can eventually access is "real harm," what exactly are you doing on HN? I post my comments knowing full well that anyone can read them. I do not think my web browsing and searching behaviour is quite the same thing. I cannot decide what to share and what not. To come up with a stupid analogy, it's like saying: "If you don't like being watched, why do you go to the supermarket?" It's not the same as being watched in my bedroom.

cromwellian 13y ago

The filter bubble thing is overstated. There are times when you want a filter bubble, when you found a piece of information and want to dig deeper on related subjects, a "conversational" interface that has at least short term memory offers big benefits. Do you really want to ask questions to an entity which acts like it has anterograde amnesia? Can you imagine Captain Picard having to continue to remind the computer of the enterprise about context? Google's 'long term memory' offers lots of benefits too, and 90% of the time, the filter bubble is the correct answer. Like when I search for a particular business on the desktop, and then later I search on my mobile device in Google Maps, and the very first auto-suggest after typing 1-2 characters it the business I searched for yesterday. This is awesome given how irritating it is to enter stuff on mobile devices, especially when in motion, the fewer characters typed the better. Most of the privacy issues can be solved just by opening up an incognito window. You can choose with 1 stroke whether you want a bubble or not.

fetbaffe 13y ago
Captain Picard definitely lives in a filter bubble. So many times he has been fooled by the bad guy is just embarrassing.
teaneedz 13y ago
Personally, I prefer this: [DuckDuckGo Privacy](https://duckduckgo.com/privacy https://duckduckgo.com/privacy) To this: [Incognito mode (browse in private) - Chrome Help](https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95464?hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95464?hl=en) Sometimes it's better to pay the price of a few extra characters to retain some control.
- coob 13y ago
  http://ddg.gg http://ddg.gg <- fewer chars
  - andyking 13y ago
    And a domain from Guernsey, who are unlikely to mess around with things. It always baffles me when I see startups using things like Libyan (.ly) and even Syrian (.sy) domains to make some cutesy word.

Kiro 13y ago

Time to stop using the Gnome browser then.

DigitalSea 13y ago

I think the NSA have proven if a particular data provider (in this case Google) doesn't agree or can't provide the info the NSA wants, the NSA have the capabilities to sniff the traffic on a multitude of levels. Privacy is an illusion, but I can attest to the fact DuckDuckGo is the more secure option.

ok_craig 13y ago
...how?

MOB98 13y ago

Email him rincon.vivian@yahoo.com

ubojan 13y ago

This might be workable for some people, I tried DDG and results aren't on the same level. DDG is getting better every day, until then my temporary solution is using "Google proxy" (anonymised Google search) like https://startpage.com/ https://startpage.com/.

fedvasu 13y ago

DuckDuckGo is nothing but a bing front-end. I do not see an upside with this switch, so basically, you are making M$ more stronger on Web. I am not being snarky, I am concerned.Google is evil sure, but is M$ better?

fedvasu 13y ago
No seriously, tell me[with citation] that it is not bing front-end. I am all for it.
- rickr 13y ago
  I think they may have gotten their data from bing in the past but these days it looks like that isn't the case. https://dukgo.com/help/en_US/results/sources https://dukgo.com/help/en_US/results/sources

icantthinkofone 13y ago

Bad move. It creates an extra step in the installation process. It forces users to then reset it back to Google search, which most everyone will do. Just like when you reset Bing in IE to Google.