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Honest question: if DuckDuckGo doesn't track the users, how can it improve when more users are using it?
by BitMastro 13y ago
Honest question: if DuckDuckGo doesn't track the users, how can it improve when more users are using it?
- jvehent 13y agoNot tracking the user's personal information doesn't mean you're not tracking the number of clicks, or calculate geoip stats.
- webdev4242 13y agoHow is that different from using Google over https without logging in?
- yk 13y agoGoogle 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 agoYou can dump your google cookies frequently or blacklist google.com from setting cookies.
- taopao 13y agoIIRC 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.
- cpeterso 13y agoOptimizing their search results globally based on user clicks is not personalization or filter bubbling.
- magicalist 13y agoThat's assuming that search preferences are homogeneous, that everyone in the world uses DDG, or that the people currently providing click data are a representative sample of the world. The first and last things might be true for a few terms, but even then, the order of the search results is a very tricky thing (e.g. NYTimes or WSJ editorial page first? the difference in traffic between 1st and even 2nd or 3rd on the search results page is huge). The only real benefit is that you and your neighbor are in the same filter bubble.
- tomkarlo 13y agoThere are upper limits to global optimization. We all don't want the same results for a given query; to get beyond some particular bound, you can't treat all users the same.
- mbrubeck 13y agoIn addition to aggregate usage stats, there's also the indirect (and slower) route: more users -> more ad impressions -> higher revenue -> more employees or other resources available to improve the service.
- fhd2 13y agoWorking for a company that takes privacy very seriously, I can say that it can be a PITA. Worth doing, but still a PITA. We had to resort to some clever trickery just to count monthly active users without any sort of unique identifier. I bet DDG faces similar challenges.
- yegg 13y agoSpot on, but worth it!
- grey-area 13y agoOut of curiosity, what solution did you hit upon? Google uses a cookie to tie visits to a certain user for analytics. The other solution I've come up with is to use a hash of IP + other identifying info, so not recording the IP or anytihng to tie it to a person, but still recording a relatively unique ID. What sort of techniques are you using?
- fhd2 13y agoWell, we have daily update requests (it's not a web app), so we knew the number of daily users already. But we really wanted to know the monthly users, gives a way better idea of the actual user numbers. What we ended up doing is to transmit the timestamp of the last update check with each update check, that way we can see which requests are the first over an arbitrary period. Granted, the situation is probably not that similar to what DDG faces, but it was just one issue that came up. What we use for web analytics is based on awstats, which operates on access logs with anonymised IPs. Not as good as Google Analytics, but as useful as it gets without JS/tracking, I guess.
- grey-area 13y agoThanks
- LukeShu 13y agoI'm not sure if they are still as responsive on Twitter as they used to be, but if you tweeted at them with a specific search term that gave poor results, they would act directly on that. It was cool to see your own input make a difference.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]