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Not tracking the user's personal information doesn't mean you're not tracking the number of clicks, or calculate geoip stats.
by 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 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.