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I like that there's competition, that drives improvement of everyone's product. To me though, improvements I'm looking for most revolve around respecting my pr

I like that there's competition, that drives improvement of everyone's product. To me though, improvements I'm looking for most revolve around respecting my privacy. For this reason, DuckDuckGo wins hands-down. They may not have top notch search results [yet], but I'm happy to help them get there since they respect my privacy more than Google or Bing, who seem like they're just competing with each other and ignoring the privacy aspect.

jaredcwhite 12y ago
I agree about the competition, I'd much rather have a larger percentage of people using Bing than there is currently for that reason alone. However, for other reasons such as you mention, DuckDuckGo is clearly the one to root for.
hadoukenio 12y ago
I've never considered this before but as I don't own or run any Microsoft devices or services, I'm finding the use of Bing as my search engine very appealing from a privacy perspective. As they have zero knowledge of my identity, I don't see any issue with using them. Any reason not to use them compared to DDG as Bing may have better search results?
chestnut-tree 12y ago
"improvements I'm looking for most revolve around respecting my privacy" Bing's privacy policy is far from perfect, but it's more informative than Google's privacy policy. Here's an example extract from Bing's privacy policy "We store search terms (and the cookie IDs associated with search terms) separately from any account information that directly identifies the user, such as name, email address and phone numbers. We have technological safeguards in place designed to prevent the unauthorised correlation of this data and we remove the entirety of the IP address after 6 months, and cookies and other cross session identifiers, after 18 months." They also clearly tell you that wiping your search history doesn't mean erasing it from their search logs: "For Bing Search in your browser, using the search terms you enter and the results you click, search history provides an easy way to revisit the sites and searches you've used before. You may clear your search history from appearing on the site by following the steps provided here or by going to the Bing preferences page noted above. Clearing your history removes it from the Search History service and prevents that history from being displayed on the site, but does not delete information from our standard search logs..." http://www.microsoft.com/privacystatement/en-gb/bingandmsn/default.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/privacystatement/en-gb/bingandmsn/d... Now compare that to Google's privacy policy which tells you nothing about whether your data is anonymised and for how long your data is kept. And all this from a company that does associate your search activity with your account (the one with with your date of birth, gender, location and possibly phone number). Remember too that Google arguably tracks and records online behaviour more than anyone else. Given the staggering amounts of data they collect, you'd think that would give them the impetus to be more informative about how they use your data, but it's quite the opposite. Their privacy policy tells you very little: https://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/policies/privacy/ https://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/policies/privacy/
glomph 12y ago
I recently used ddg at uni without adblock and it is horrible. They have no problem serving phishing sites just above legitimate ones with very little indication that they are adverts.

jaredcwhite 12y ago

I agree about the competition, I'd much rather have a larger percentage of people using Bing than there is currently for that reason alone. However, for other reasons such as you mention, DuckDuckGo is clearly the one to root for.

hadoukenio 12y ago

I've never considered this before but as I don't own or run any Microsoft devices or services, I'm finding the use of Bing as my search engine very appealing from a privacy perspective. As they have zero knowledge of my identity, I don't see any issue with using them. Any reason not to use them compared to DDG as Bing may have better search results?

chestnut-tree 12y ago

"improvements I'm looking for most revolve around respecting my privacy" Bing's privacy policy is far from perfect, but it's more informative than Google's privacy policy. Here's an example extract from Bing's privacy policy "We store search terms (and the cookie IDs associated with search terms) separately from any account information that directly identifies the user, such as name, email address and phone numbers. We have technological safeguards in place designed to prevent the unauthorised correlation of this data and we remove the entirety of the IP address after 6 months, and cookies and other cross session identifiers, after 18 months." They also clearly tell you that wiping your search history doesn't mean erasing it from their search logs: "For Bing Search in your browser, using the search terms you enter and the results you click, search history provides an easy way to revisit the sites and searches you've used before. You may clear your search history from appearing on the site by following the steps provided here or by going to the Bing preferences page noted above. Clearing your history removes it from the Search History service and prevents that history from being displayed on the site, but does not delete information from our standard search logs..." http://www.microsoft.com/privacystatement/en-gb/bingandmsn/default.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/privacystatement/en-gb/bingandmsn/d... Now compare that to Google's privacy policy which tells you nothing about whether your data is anonymised and for how long your data is kept. And all this from a company that does associate your search activity with your account (the one with with your date of birth, gender, location and possibly phone number). Remember too that Google arguably tracks and records online behaviour more than anyone else. Given the staggering amounts of data they collect, you'd think that would give them the impetus to be more informative about how they use your data, but it's quite the opposite. Their privacy policy tells you very little: https://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/policies/privacy/ https://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/policies/privacy/

glomph 12y ago

I recently used ddg at uni without adblock and it is horrible. They have no problem serving phishing sites just above legitimate ones with very little indication that they are adverts.