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Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway.

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  Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. "(p)ing^~dvox:::::::::z" <dvox@hotbot.com> - 2019-02-15 04:21 +0000
    Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. whodunit <whodunit@notme.org> - 2019-03-08 20:39 +0000
      Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. scott@alfter.diespammersdie.us (Scott Alfter) - 2019-03-08 21:18 +0000
        Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2019-03-10 22:48 -0400
      Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. Bob Eager <news0073@eager.cx> - 2019-03-08 21:32 +0000
        Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. Roger Blake <rogblake@iname.invalid> - 2019-03-09 02:15 +0000
          Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. Bob Eager <news0073@eager.cx> - 2019-03-09 09:14 +0000
          Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> - 2019-03-09 09:41 +0000
          Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) - 2019-03-13 10:17 -0400
            Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. danny burstein <dannyb@panix.com> - 2019-03-13 16:29 +0000
      Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> - 2019-03-08 21:38 +0000
        Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2019-03-08 23:51 +0000
        Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. nunnurbiz <whodunit@notme.org> - 2019-03-12 02:08 +0000
          Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2019-03-12 21:53 +0000
            Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. nunnurbiz <whodunit@notme.org> - 2019-03-13 19:59 +0000
              Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> - 2019-03-13 20:17 +0000
              Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2019-03-13 22:12 +0000
                Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> - 2019-03-14 20:36 +0000
                  Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2019-03-15 08:51 -0400
              Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. scott@alfter.diespammersdie.us (Scott Alfter) - 2019-03-14 21:23 +0000
    Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. NUNURBIZ <NUNURBIZ@YAHOO.COM> - 2019-04-19 02:00 +0000
      Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> - 2019-04-19 10:53 +0000
        Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. tom <tom@0.0.0.0> - 2019-04-28 09:55 -0700
          Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> - 2019-04-28 17:48 +0000
            Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2019-04-29 16:42 -0400
              Re: Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2019-04-29 23:19 +0000

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#901 — Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway.

2019 may finally be the year for 'The Search Engine That Doesn't Track You'

<https://medium.com/s/story/nothing-can-stop-google-duckduckgo-is-trying-anyway-718eb7391423>

In late November, hotel conglomerate Marriott International disclosed that the personal information of some 500 million customers_-_including home addresses, phone numbers, and credit card numbers_-_had been exposed as part of a data breach affecting its Starwood Hotels and Resorts network. One day earlier, the venerable breakfast chain Dunkin' (nee Donuts) announced that its rewards program had been compromised. Only two weeks before that, it was revealed that a major two-factor authentication provider had exposed millions of temporary account passwords and reset links for Google, Amazon, HQ Trivia, Yahoo, and Microsoft users.

These were just the icing on the cake for a year of compromised data: Adidas, Orbitz, Macy's, Under Armour, Sears, Forever 21, Whole Foods, Ticketfly, Delta, Panera Bread, and Best Buy, just to name a few, were all affected by security breaches.

Meanwhile, there's a growing sense that the tech giants have finally turned on their users. Amazon dominates so many facets of the online shopping experience that legislators may have to rewrite antitrust law to rein them in. Google has been playing fast and loose with its "Don't Be Evil" mantra by almost launching a censored search engine for the Chinese government while simultaneously developing killer A.I. for Pentagon drones. And we now know that Facebook collected people's personal data without their consent, had third party deals that would have allegedly made it possible for Spotify and Netflix to look at users' private messages, fueled fake news and the rise of Donald Trump, and was used to facilitate a genocide in Myanmar.

The backlash against these companies dominated our national discourse in 2018. The European Union is cracking down on anticompetitive practices at Amazon and Google. Both Facebook and Twitter have had their turns in the congressional hot seat, facing questions from slightly confused but definitely irate lawmakers about how the two companies choose what information to show us and what they do with our data when we're not looking. Worries over privacy have led everyone from the New York Times to Brian Acton, the disgruntled co-founder of Facebook-owned WhatsApp, to call for a Facebook exodus. And judging by Facebook's stagnating rate of user growth, people seem to be listening.

For Gabriel Weinberg, the founder and CEO of privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo, our growing tech skepticism recalls the early 1900s, when Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle revealed the previously unexamined horrors of the meatpacking industry. "Industries have historically gone through periods of almost ignorant bliss, and then people start to expose how the sausage is being made," he says.

This, in a nutshell, is DuckDuckGo's proposition: "The big tech companies are taking advantage of you by selling your data. We won't." In effect, it's an anti-sales sales pitch. DuckDuckGo is perhaps the most prominent in a number of small but rapidly growing firms attempting to make it big_-_or at least sustainable_-_by putting their customers' privacy and security first. And unlike the previous generation of privacy products, such as Tor or SecureDrop, these services are easy to use and intuitive, and their user bases aren't exclusively composed of political activists, security researchers, and paranoiacs. The same day Weinberg and I spoke, DuckDuckGo's search engine returned results for 33,626,258 queries_-_a new daily record for the company. Weinberg estimates that since 2014, DuckDuckGo's traffic has been increasing at a rate of "about 50 percent a year," a claim backed up by the company's publicly available traffic data.

"You can run a profitable company_-_which we are_-_without [using] a surveillance business model," Weinberg says. If he's right, DuckDuckGo stands to capitalize handsomely off our collective backlash against the giants of the web economy and establish a prominent brand in the coming era of data privacy. If he's wrong, his company looks more like a last dying gasp before surveillance capitalism finally takes over the world.

DuckDuckGo is based just east of nowhere. Not in the Bay Area, or New York, or Weinberg's hometown of Atlanta, or in Boston, where he and his wife met while attending MIT. Instead, DuckDuckGo headquarters is set along a side street just off the main drag of Paoli, Pennsylvania, in a building that looks like a cross between a Pennsylvania Dutch house and a modest Catholic church, on the second floor above a laser eye surgery center. Stained-glass windows look out onto the street, and a small statue of an angel hangs precariously off the roof. On the second floor, a door leading out to a balcony is framed by a pair of friendly looking cartoon ducks, one of which wears an eye patch. Just before DuckDuckGo's entrance sits a welcome mat that reads "COME BACK WITH A WARRANT."

"People don't generally show up at our doorstep, but I hope that at some point it'll be useful," Weinberg tells me, sitting on a couch a few feet from an Aqua Teen Hunger Force mural that takes up a quarter of a wall. At 39, he is energetic, affable, and generally much more at ease with himself than the stereotypical tech CEO. The office around us looks like it was furnished by the set designer of Ready Player One: a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy print in the entryway, Japanese-style panels depicting the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the bathroom, and a vintage-looking RoboCop pinball machine in the break room. There's even a Lego model of the DeLorean from Back to the Future on his desk. The furniture, Weinberg tells me, is mostly from Ikea. The lamp in the communal area is a hand-me-down from his mom.

Weinberg learned basic programming on an Atari while he was still in elementary school. Before hitting puberty, he'd built an early internet bulletin board. "It didn't really have a purpose" in the beginning, Weinberg says. The one feature that made his bulletin board unique, he says, was that he hosted anonymous AMA-style question panels with his father, an infectious disease doctor with substantial experience treating AIDS patients. This was during the early 1990s, when the stigma surrounding HIV and AIDS remained so great that doctors were known to deny treatment to those suffering from it. Weinberg says that the free-and private-medical advice made the board a valuable resource for the small number of people who found it. It was an early instance of Weinberg's interest in facilitating access to information, as well as a cogent example of the power of online privacy: "The ability to access informational resources anonymously actually opens up that access significantly," he told me over email.

After graduating from MIT in 2001, Weinberg launched a slew of businesses, none of which are particularly memorable. First there was an educational software program called Learnection. ("Terrible name_ the idea was good, but 15 years too early," he says.) Then he co-founded an early social networking company called Opobox, taking on no employees and writing all the code himself. "Facebook just kind of obliterated it," Weinberg says, though he was able to sell the network to the parent company of Classmates.com for roughly $10 million in cash in 2006.

It was around that time when Weinberg began working on what would become DuckDuckGo. Google had yet to achieve total hegemony over the internet search field, and Weinberg felt that he could create a browser plugin that might help eliminate the scourge of spammy search results in other search engines.

To build an algorithm that weeded out bad search results, he first had to do it by hand. "I took a large sample of different pages and hand-marked them as 'spam' or 'not spam.'" The process of scraping the web, Weinberg says, inadvertently earned him a visit from the FBI. "Once they realized I was just crawling the web, they just went away," he says. He also experimented with creating a proto-Quora service that allowed anyone to pose a question and have it answered by someone else, as well as a free alternative to Meetup.com. Eventually, he combined facets of all three efforts into a full-on search engine.

When Weinberg first launched DuckDuckGo in 2008_-_the name is a wink to the children's game of skipping over the wrong options to get to the right one_-_he differentiated his search engine by offering instant answers to basic questions (essentially an early open-source version of Google's Answer Box), spam filtering, and highly customizable search results based on user preferences. "Those [were] things that early adopters kind of appreciated," he says.

At the time, Weinberg says, consumer privacy was not a central concern. In 2009, when he made the decision to stop collecting personal search data, it was more a matter of practicality than a principled decision about civil liberties. Instead of storing troves of data on every user and targeting those users individually, DuckDuckGo would simply sell ads against search keywords. Most of DuckDuckGo's revenue, he explains, is still generated this way. The system doesn't capitalize on targeted ads, but, Weinberg says, "I think there's a choice between squeezing out every ounce of profit and making ethical decisions that aren't at the expense of society."

Until 2011, Weinberg was DuckDuckGo's sole full-time employee. That year, he pushed to expand the company. He bought a billboard in Google's backyard of San Francisco that proudly proclaimed, "Google tracks you. We don't." (That defiant gesture and others like it were later parodied on HBO's Silicon Valley.) The stunt paid off in spades, doubling DuckDuckGo's daily search traffic. Weinberg began courting VC investors, eventually selling a minority stake in the company to Union Square Ventures, the firm that has also backed SoundCloud, Coinbase, Kickstarter, and Stripe. That fall, he hired his first full-time employee, and DuckDuckGo moved out of Weinberg's house and into the strangest-looking office in all of Paoli, Pennsylvania.

Then, in 2013, digital privacy became front-page news. That year, NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked a series of documents to the Guardian and the Washington Post revealing the existence of the NSA's PRISM program, which granted the agency unfettered access to the personal data of millions of Americans through a secret back door into the servers of Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, and other major internet firms. Though Google denied any knowledge of the program, the reputational damage had been done. DuckDuckGo rode a wave of press coverage, enjoying placement in stories that offered data privacy solutions to millions of newly freaked-out people worried that the government was spying on them.

"All of a sudden we were part of this international story," Weinberg says. The next year, DuckDuckGo turned a profit. Shortly thereafter, Weinberg finally started paying himself a salary.

Today, DuckDuckGo employs 55 people, most of whom work remotely from around the world. (On the day I visited, there were maybe five employees in the Paoli office, plus one dog.) This year, the company went through its second funding round of VC funding, accepting a $10 million investment from Canadian firm OMERS. Weinberg insists that both OMERS and Union Square Ventures are "deeply interested in privacy and restoring power to the non-monopoly providers." Later, via email, Weinberg declined to share DuckDuckGo's exact revenue, beyond the fact that its 2018 gross revenue exceeded $25 million, a figure the company has chosen to disclose in order to stress that it is subject to the California Consumer Privacy Act. Weinberg feels that the company's main challenge these days is improving brand recognition.

"I don't think there's many trustworthy entities on the internet, just straight-up," he says. "Ads follow people around. Most people have gotten multiple data breaches. Most people know somebody who's had some kind of identity theft issue. The percentage of people who've had those events happen to them has just grown and grown."

The recent investment from OMERS has helped cover the cost of DuckDuckGo's new app, launched in January 2018. The app, a lightweight mobile web browser for iOS and Android that's also available as a Chrome plugin, is built around the DuckDuckGo search engine. It gives each site you visit a letter grade based on its privacy practices and has an option to let you know which web trackers_-_usually ones from Google, Facebook, or Comscore_-_it blocked from monitoring your browsing activity. After you've finished surfing, you can press a little flame icon and an oddly satisfying animated fire engulfs your screen, indicating that you've deleted your tabs and cleared your search history.

The rest of the recent investment, Weinberg says, has been spent on "trying to explain to people in the world that [DuckDuckGo] exists." He continues, "That's our main issue_-_the vast majority of people don't realize there's a simple solution to reduce their [online] footprint." To that end, DuckDuckGo maintains an in-house consumer advocacy blog called Spread Privacy, offering helpful tips on how to protect yourself online as well as commentary and analysis on the state of online surveillance. Its most recent initiative was a study on how filter bubbles_-_the term for how a site like Google uses our data to show us what it thinks we want_-_can shape the political news we consume.

Brand recognition is a challenge for a lot of startups offering privacy-focused digital services. After all, the competition includes some of the biggest and most prominent companies in the world: Google, Apple, Facebook. And in some ways, this is an entire new sector of the market. "Privacy has traditionally not been a product; it's been more like a set of best practices," says David Temkin, chief product officer for the Brave web browser. "Imagine turning that set of best practices into a product. That's kind of where we're going."

Like DuckDuckGo_-_whose search engine Brave incorporates into its private browsing mode_-_Brave doesn't collect user data and blocks ads and web trackers by default. In 2018, Brave's user base exploded from 1 million to 5.5 million, and the company reached a deal with HTC to be the default browser on the manufacturer's upcoming Exodus smartphone.

Temkin, who first moved out to the Bay Area in the early '90s to work at Apple, says that the past two decades of consolidation under Google/Facebook/Netflix/Apple/Amazon have radically upended the notion of the internet as a safe haven for the individual. "It's swung back to a very centralized model," he says. "The digital advertising landscape has turned into a surveillance ecosystem. The way to optimize the value of advertising is through better targeting and better data collection. And, well, water goes downhill."

In companies such as Brave and DuckDuckGo, Temkin sees a return to the more conscientious attitude behind early personal computing. "I think to an ordinary user, [privacy] is starting to sound like something they do need to care about," he says.

But to succeed, these companies will have to make privacy as accessible and simple as possible. "Privacy's not gonna win if it's a specialist tool that requires an expert to wield," Temkin says. "What we're doing is trying to package [those practices] in a way that's empathetic and respectful to the user but doesn't impose the requirement for knowledge or the regular ongoing annoyance that might go with maintaining privacy on your own."

In November, I decided to switch my personal search querying to DuckDuckGo in order to see whether it was a feasible solution to my online surveillance woes. Physically making the switch is relatively seamless. The search engine is already an optional default in browsers such as Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox, as well as more niche browsers such as Brave and Tor, the latter of which made DuckDuckGo its default search in 2016.

Actually using the service, though, can be slightly disorienting. I use Google on a daily basis for one simple reason: It's easy. When I need to find something online, it knows what to look for. To boot, it gives me free email, which is connected to the free word processor that my editor and I are using to work on this article together in real time. It knows me. It's only when I consider the implications of handing over a digital record of my life to a massive company that the sense of free-floating dread about digital surveillance kicks in. Otherwise, it's great. And that's the exact hurdle DuckDuckGo is trying to convince people to clear.

Using DuckDuckGo can feel like relearning to walk after you've spent a decade flying. On Google, a search for, say, "vape shop" yields a map of vape shops in my area. On DuckDuckGo, that same search returns a list of online vaporizer retailers. The difference, of course, is the data: Google knows that I'm in Durham, North Carolina. As far as DuckDuckGo is concerned, I may as well be on the moon.

That's not to say using DuckDuckGo is all bad. For one, it can feel mildly revelatory knowing that you're seeing the same search results that anyone else would. It restores a sense of objectivity to the internet at a time when being online can feel like stepping into The Truman Show_-_a world created to serve and revolve around you. And I was able to look up stuff I wanted to know about_-_how to open a vacuum-sealed mattress I'd bought off the internet, the origin of the martingale dog collar, the latest insane thing Donald Trump did_-_all without the possibility of my search history coming back to haunt me in the form of ads for bedding, dog leashes, or anti-Trump knickknacks. Without personalized results, DuckDuckGo just needs to know what most people are looking for when they type in search terms and serve against that. And most of the time, we fit the profile of most people.

When I asked Weinberg if he wanted to displace Google as the top search engine in all the land, he demurred. "I mean, I wouldn't be opposed to it," he says, "but it's really not our intention, and I don't expect that to happen." Instead, he'd like to see DuckDuckGo as a "second option" to Google for people who are interested in maintaining their online anonymity. "Even if you don't have anything to hide, it doesn't mean you want people to profit off your information or be manipulated or biased against as a result [of that information]," he says.

Even though DuckDuckGo may serve a different market and never even challenge Google head-on, the search giant remains its largest hurdle in the long term. For more than a decade, Google has been synonymous with search. And that association is hard, if not impossible, to break.

In the meantime, the two companies are on frosty terms. In 2010, Google obtained the domain duck.com as part of a larger business deal in a company formerly known as Duck Co. For years, the domain would redirect to Google's search page, despite seeming like something you'd type into your browser while trying to get to DuckDuckGo. After DuckDuckGo petitioned for ownership for nearly a decade, Google finally handed over the domain in December. The acquisition was a minor branding coup for DuckDuckGo_-_and a potential hedge against accusations of antitrust for Google.

That doesn't mean relations between the two companies have improved. As the Goliath in the room, Google could attempt to undercut DuckDuckGo's entire business proposition. Over the past few years, even mainstream players have attempted to assuage our privacy anxieties by offering VPNs (Verizon), hosting "privacy pop-ups" (Facebook), and using their billions to fight against state surveillance in court (Microsoft). With some tweaks, Google could essentially copy DuckDuckGo wholesale and create its own privacy-focused search engine with many of the same protections DuckDuckGo has built its business on. As to whether people would actually believe that Google, a company that muscled its way into becoming an integral part of the online infrastructure by selling people's data, could suddenly transform into a guardian of that data remains to be seen.

When it comes to the internet, trust is something easily lost and difficult to regain. In a sense, every time a giant of the internet surveillance economy is revealed to have sold out its customers in some innovatively horrifying way, the ensuing chaos almost serves as free advertising for DuckDuckGo. "The world keeps going in a bad direction, and it makes people think, 'Hey, I would like to escape some of the bad stuff on the internet and go to a safer place,'" Weinberg says. "And that's where we see ourselves."

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#912

"(p)ing^~dvox:::::::::z" <dvox@hotbot.com> wrote in
news:q45eo5$4hi$2@neodomea5yrhcabc.onion: 

> 2019 may finally be the year for 'The Search Engine That Doesn't Track
> You' 
> 
> <https://medium.com/s/story/nothing-can-stop-google-duckduckgo-is-tryin
> g-anyway-718eb7391423> 
> 
> In late November, hotel conglomerate Marriott International disclosed
> that the personal information of some 500 million
> customers_-_including home addresses, phone numbers, and credit card
> numbers_-_had been exposed as part of a data breach affecting its
> Starwood Hotels and Resorts network. One day earlier, the venerable
> breakfast chain Dunkin' (nee Donuts) announced that its rewards
> program had been compromised. Only two weeks before that, it was
> revealed that a major two-factor authentication provider had exposed
> millions of temporary account passwords and reset links for Google,
> Amazon, HQ Trivia, Yahoo, and Microsoft users. 
> 
> These were just the icing on the cake for a year of compromised data:
> Adidas, Orbitz, Macy's, Under Armour, Sears, Forever 21, Whole Foods,
> Ticketfly, Delta, Panera Bread, and Best Buy, just to name a few, were
> all affected by security breaches. 
> 
> Meanwhile, there's a growing sense that the tech giants have finally
> turned on their users. Amazon dominates so many facets of the online
> shopping experience that legislators may have to rewrite antitrust law
> to rein them in. Google has been playing fast and loose with its
> "Don't Be Evil" mantra by almost launching a censored search engine
> for the Chinese government while simultaneously developing killer A.I.
> for Pentagon drones. And we now know that Facebook collected people's
> personal data without their consent, had third party deals that would
> have allegedly made it possible for Spotify and Netflix to look at
> users' private messages, fueled fake news and the rise of Donald
> Trump, and was used to facilitate a genocide in Myanmar. 
> 
> The backlash against these companies dominated our national discourse
> in 2018. The European Union is cracking down on anticompetitive
> practices at Amazon and Google. Both Facebook and Twitter have had
> their turns in the congressional hot seat, facing questions from
> slightly confused but definitely irate lawmakers about how the two
> companies choose what information to show us and what they do with our
> data when we're not looking. Worries over privacy have led everyone
> from the New York Times to Brian Acton, the disgruntled co-founder of
> Facebook-owned WhatsApp, to call for a Facebook exodus. And judging by
> Facebook's stagnating rate of user growth, people seem to be
> listening. 
> 
> For Gabriel Weinberg, the founder and CEO of privacy-focused search
> engine DuckDuckGo, our growing tech skepticism recalls the early
> 1900s, when Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle revealed the previously
> unexamined horrors of the meatpacking industry. "Industries have
> historically gone through periods of almost ignorant bliss, and then
> people start to expose how the sausage is being made," he says. 
> 
> This, in a nutshell, is DuckDuckGo's proposition: "The big tech
> companies are taking advantage of you by selling your data. We won't."
> In effect, it's an anti-sales sales pitch. DuckDuckGo is perhaps the
> most prominent in a number of small but rapidly growing firms
> attempting to make it big_-_or at least sustainable_-_by putting their
> customers' privacy and security first. And unlike the previous
> generation of privacy products, such as Tor or SecureDrop, these
> services are easy to use and intuitive, and their user bases aren't
> exclusively composed of political activists, security researchers, and
> paranoiacs. The same day Weinberg and I spoke, DuckDuckGo's search
> engine returned results for 33,626,258 queries_-_a new daily record
> for the company. Weinberg estimates that since 2014, DuckDuckGo's
> traffic has been increasing at a rate of "about 50 percent a year," a
> claim backed up by the company's publicly available traffic data. 
> 
> "You can run a profitable company_-_which we are_-_without [using] a
> surveillance business model," Weinberg says. If he's right, DuckDuckGo
> stands to capitalize handsomely off our collective backlash against
> the giants of the web economy and establish a prominent brand in the
> coming era of data privacy. If he's wrong, his company looks more like
> a last dying gasp before surveillance capitalism finally takes over
> the world. 
> 
> DuckDuckGo is based just east of nowhere. Not in the Bay Area, or New
> York, or Weinberg's hometown of Atlanta, or in Boston, where he and
> his wife met while attending MIT. Instead, DuckDuckGo headquarters is
> set along a side street just off the main drag of Paoli, Pennsylvania,
> in a building that looks like a cross between a Pennsylvania Dutch
> house and a modest Catholic church, on the second floor above a laser
> eye surgery center. Stained-glass windows look out onto the street,
> and a small statue of an angel hangs precariously off the roof. On the
> second floor, a door leading out to a balcony is framed by a pair of
> friendly looking cartoon ducks, one of which wears an eye patch. Just
> before DuckDuckGo's entrance sits a welcome mat that reads "COME BACK
> WITH A WARRANT." 
> 
> "People don't generally show up at our doorstep, but I hope that at
> some point it'll be useful," Weinberg tells me, sitting on a couch a
> few feet from an Aqua Teen Hunger Force mural that takes up a quarter
> of a wall. At 39, he is energetic, affable, and generally much more at
> ease with himself than the stereotypical tech CEO. The office around
> us looks like it was furnished by the set designer of Ready Player
> One: a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy print in the entryway,
> Japanese-style panels depicting the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in
> the bathroom, and a vintage-looking RoboCop pinball machine in the
> break room. There's even a Lego model of the DeLorean from Back to the
> Future on his desk. The furniture, Weinberg tells me, is mostly from
> Ikea. The lamp in the communal area is a hand-me-down from his mom. 
> 
> Weinberg learned basic programming on an Atari while he was still in
> elementary school. Before hitting puberty, he'd built an early
> internet bulletin board. "It didn't really have a purpose" in the
> beginning, Weinberg says. The one feature that made his bulletin board
> unique, he says, was that he hosted anonymous AMA-style question
> panels with his father, an infectious disease doctor with substantial
> experience treating AIDS patients. This was during the early 1990s,
> when the stigma surrounding HIV and AIDS remained so great that
> doctors were known to deny treatment to those suffering from it.
> Weinberg says that the free-and private-medical advice made the board
> a valuable resource for the small number of people who found it. It
> was an early instance of Weinberg's interest in facilitating access to
> information, as well as a cogent example of the power of online
> privacy: "The ability to access informational resources anonymously
> actually opens up that access significantly," he told me over email. 
> 
> After graduating from MIT in 2001, Weinberg launched a slew of
> businesses, none of which are particularly memorable. First there was
> an educational software program called Learnection. ("Terrible name_
> the idea was good, but 15 years too early," he says.) Then he
> co-founded an early social networking company called Opobox, taking on
> no employees and writing all the code himself. "Facebook just kind of
> obliterated it," Weinberg says, though he was able to sell the network
> to the parent company of Classmates.com for roughly $10 million in
> cash in 2006. 
> 
> It was around that time when Weinberg began working on what would
> become DuckDuckGo. Google had yet to achieve total hegemony over the
> internet search field, and Weinberg felt that he could create a
> browser plugin that might help eliminate the scourge of spammy search
> results in other search engines. 
> 
> To build an algorithm that weeded out bad search results, he first had
> to do it by hand. "I took a large sample of different pages and
> hand-marked them as 'spam' or 'not spam.'" The process of scraping the
> web, Weinberg says, inadvertently earned him a visit from the FBI.
> "Once they realized I was just crawling the web, they just went away,"
> he says. He also experimented with creating a proto-Quora service that
> allowed anyone to pose a question and have it answered by someone
> else, as well as a free alternative to Meetup.com. Eventually, he
> combined facets of all three efforts into a full-on search engine. 
> 
> When Weinberg first launched DuckDuckGo in 2008_-_the name is a wink
> to the children's game of skipping over the wrong options to get to
> the right one_-_he differentiated his search engine by offering
> instant answers to basic questions (essentially an early open-source
> version of Google's Answer Box), spam filtering, and highly
> customizable search results based on user preferences. "Those [were]
> things that early adopters kind of appreciated," he says. 
> 
> At the time, Weinberg says, consumer privacy was not a central
> concern. In 2009, when he made the decision to stop collecting
> personal search data, it was more a matter of practicality than a
> principled decision about civil liberties. Instead of storing troves
> of data on every user and targeting those users individually,
> DuckDuckGo would simply sell ads against search keywords. Most of
> DuckDuckGo's revenue, he explains, is still generated this way. The
> system doesn't capitalize on targeted ads, but, Weinberg says, "I
> think there's a choice between squeezing out every ounce of profit and
> making ethical decisions that aren't at the expense of society." 
> 
> Until 2011, Weinberg was DuckDuckGo's sole full-time employee. That
> year, he pushed to expand the company. He bought a billboard in
> Google's backyard of San Francisco that proudly proclaimed, "Google
> tracks you. We don't." (That defiant gesture and others like it were
> later parodied on HBO's Silicon Valley.) The stunt paid off in spades,
> doubling DuckDuckGo's daily search traffic. Weinberg began courting VC
> investors, eventually selling a minority stake in the company to Union
> Square Ventures, the firm that has also backed SoundCloud, Coinbase,
> Kickstarter, and Stripe. That fall, he hired his first full-time
> employee, and DuckDuckGo moved out of Weinberg's house and into the
> strangest-looking office in all of Paoli, Pennsylvania. 
> 
> Then, in 2013, digital privacy became front-page news. That year, NSA
> contractor Edward Snowden leaked a series of documents to the Guardian
> and the Washington Post revealing the existence of the NSA's PRISM
> program, which granted the agency unfettered access to the personal
> data of millions of Americans through a secret back door into the
> servers of Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, and other major internet
> firms. Though Google denied any knowledge of the program, the
> reputational damage had been done. DuckDuckGo rode a wave of press
> coverage, enjoying placement in stories that offered data privacy
> solutions to millions of newly freaked-out people worried that the
> government was spying on them. 
> 
> "All of a sudden we were part of this international story," Weinberg
> says. The next year, DuckDuckGo turned a profit. Shortly thereafter,
> Weinberg finally started paying himself a salary. 
> 
> Today, DuckDuckGo employs 55 people, most of whom work remotely from
> around the world. (On the day I visited, there were maybe five
> employees in the Paoli office, plus one dog.) This year, the company
> went through its second funding round of VC funding, accepting a $10
> million investment from Canadian firm OMERS. Weinberg insists that
> both OMERS and Union Square Ventures are "deeply interested in privacy
> and restoring power to the non-monopoly providers." Later, via email,
> Weinberg declined to share DuckDuckGo's exact revenue, beyond the fact
> that its 2018 gross revenue exceeded $25 million, a figure the company
> has chosen to disclose in order to stress that it is subject to the
> California Consumer Privacy Act. Weinberg feels that the company's
> main challenge these days is improving brand recognition. 
> 
> "I don't think there's many trustworthy entities on the internet, just
> straight-up," he says. "Ads follow people around. Most people have
> gotten multiple data breaches. Most people know somebody who's had
> some kind of identity theft issue. The percentage of people who've had
> those events happen to them has just grown and grown." 
> 
> The recent investment from OMERS has helped cover the cost of
> DuckDuckGo's new app, launched in January 2018. The app, a lightweight
> mobile web browser for iOS and Android that's also available as a
> Chrome plugin, is built around the DuckDuckGo search engine. It gives
> each site you visit a letter grade based on its privacy practices and
> has an option to let you know which web trackers_-_usually ones from
> Google, Facebook, or Comscore_-_it blocked from monitoring your
> browsing activity. After you've finished surfing, you can press a
> little flame icon and an oddly satisfying animated fire engulfs your
> screen, indicating that you've deleted your tabs and cleared your
> search history. 
> 
> The rest of the recent investment, Weinberg says, has been spent on
> "trying to explain to people in the world that [DuckDuckGo] exists."
> He continues, "That's our main issue_-_the vast majority of people
> don't realize there's a simple solution to reduce their [online]
> footprint." To that end, DuckDuckGo maintains an in-house consumer
> advocacy blog called Spread Privacy, offering helpful tips on how to
> protect yourself online as well as commentary and analysis on the
> state of online surveillance. Its most recent initiative was a study
> on how filter bubbles_-_the term for how a site like Google uses our
> data to show us what it thinks we want_-_can shape the political news
> we consume. 
> 
> Brand recognition is a challenge for a lot of startups offering
> privacy-focused digital services. After all, the competition includes
> some of the biggest and most prominent companies in the world: Google,
> Apple, Facebook. And in some ways, this is an entire new sector of the
> market. "Privacy has traditionally not been a product; it's been more
> like a set of best practices," says David Temkin, chief product
> officer for the Brave web browser. "Imagine turning that set of best
> practices into a product. That's kind of where we're going." 
> 
> Like DuckDuckGo_-_whose search engine Brave incorporates into its
> private browsing mode_-_Brave doesn't collect user data and blocks ads
> and web trackers by default. In 2018, Brave's user base exploded from
> 1 million to 5.5 million, and the company reached a deal with HTC to
> be the default browser on the manufacturer's upcoming Exodus
> smartphone. 
> 
> Temkin, who first moved out to the Bay Area in the early '90s to work
> at Apple, says that the past two decades of consolidation under
> Google/Facebook/Netflix/Apple/Amazon have radically upended the notion
> of the internet as a safe haven for the individual. "It's swung back
> to a very centralized model," he says. "The digital advertising
> landscape has turned into a surveillance ecosystem. The way to
> optimize the value of advertising is through better targeting and
> better data collection. And, well, water goes downhill." 
> 
> In companies such as Brave and DuckDuckGo, Temkin sees a return to the
> more conscientious attitude behind early personal computing. "I think
> to an ordinary user, [privacy] is starting to sound like something
> they do need to care about," he says. 
> 
> But to succeed, these companies will have to make privacy as
> accessible and simple as possible. "Privacy's not gonna win if it's a
> specialist tool that requires an expert to wield," Temkin says. "What
> we're doing is trying to package [those practices] in a way that's
> empathetic and respectful to the user but doesn't impose the
> requirement for knowledge or the regular ongoing annoyance that might
> go with maintaining privacy on your own." 
> 
> In November, I decided to switch my personal search querying to
> DuckDuckGo in order to see whether it was a feasible solution to my
> online surveillance woes. Physically making the switch is relatively
> seamless. The search engine is already an optional default in browsers
> such as Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox, as well as more niche
> browsers such as Brave and Tor, the latter of which made DuckDuckGo
> its default search in 2016. 
> 
> Actually using the service, though, can be slightly disorienting. I
> use Google on a daily basis for one simple reason: It's easy. When I
> need to find something online, it knows what to look for. To boot, it
> gives me free email, which is connected to the free word processor
> that my editor and I are using to work on this article together in
> real time. It knows me. It's only when I consider the implications of
> handing over a digital record of my life to a massive company that the
> sense of free-floating dread about digital surveillance kicks in.
> Otherwise, it's great. And that's the exact hurdle DuckDuckGo is
> trying to convince people to clear. 
> 
> Using DuckDuckGo can feel like relearning to walk after you've spent a
> decade flying. On Google, a search for, say, "vape shop" yields a map
> of vape shops in my area. On DuckDuckGo, that same search returns a
> list of online vaporizer retailers. The difference, of course, is the
> data: Google knows that I'm in Durham, North Carolina. As far as
> DuckDuckGo is concerned, I may as well be on the moon. 
> 
> That's not to say using DuckDuckGo is all bad. For one, it can feel
> mildly revelatory knowing that you're seeing the same search results
> that anyone else would. It restores a sense of objectivity to the
> internet at a time when being online can feel like stepping into The
> Truman Show_-_a world created to serve and revolve around you. And I
> was able to look up stuff I wanted to know about_-_how to open a
> vacuum-sealed mattress I'd bought off the internet, the origin of the
> martingale dog collar, the latest insane thing Donald Trump did_-_all
> without the possibility of my search history coming back to haunt me
> in the form of ads for bedding, dog leashes, or anti-Trump
> knickknacks. Without personalized results, DuckDuckGo just needs to
> know what most people are looking for when they type in search terms
> and serve against that. And most of the time, we fit the profile of
> most people. 
> 
> When I asked Weinberg if he wanted to displace Google as the top
> search engine in all the land, he demurred. "I mean, I wouldn't be
> opposed to it," he says, "but it's really not our intention, and I
> don't expect that to happen." Instead, he'd like to see DuckDuckGo as
> a "second option" to Google for people who are interested in
> maintaining their online anonymity. "Even if you don't have anything
> to hide, it doesn't mean you want people to profit off your
> information or be manipulated or biased against as a result [of that
> information]," he says. 
> 
> Even though DuckDuckGo may serve a different market and never even
> challenge Google head-on, the search giant remains its largest hurdle
> in the long term. For more than a decade, Google has been synonymous
> with search. And that association is hard, if not impossible, to
> break. 
> 
> In the meantime, the two companies are on frosty terms. In 2010,
> Google obtained the domain duck.com as part of a larger business deal
> in a company formerly known as Duck Co. For years, the domain would
> redirect to Google's search page, despite seeming like something you'd
> type into your browser while trying to get to DuckDuckGo. After
> DuckDuckGo petitioned for ownership for nearly a decade, Google
> finally handed over the domain in December. The acquisition was a
> minor branding coup for DuckDuckGo_-_and a potential hedge against
> accusations of antitrust for Google. 
> 
> That doesn't mean relations between the two companies have improved.
> As the Goliath in the room, Google could attempt to undercut
> DuckDuckGo's entire business proposition. Over the past few years,
> even mainstream players have attempted to assuage our privacy
> anxieties by offering VPNs (Verizon), hosting "privacy pop-ups"
> (Facebook), and using their billions to fight against state
> surveillance in court (Microsoft). With some tweaks, Google could
> essentially copy DuckDuckGo wholesale and create its own
> privacy-focused search engine with many of the same protections
> DuckDuckGo has built its business on. As to whether people would
> actually believe that Google, a company that muscled its way into
> becoming an integral part of the online infrastructure by selling
> people's data, could suddenly transform into a guardian of that data
> remains to be seen. 
> 
> When it comes to the internet, trust is something easily lost and
> difficult to regain. In a sense, every time a giant of the internet
> surveillance economy is revealed to have sold out its customers in
> some innovatively horrifying way, the ensuing chaos almost serves as
> free advertising for DuckDuckGo. "The world keeps going in a bad
> direction, and it makes people think, 'Hey, I would like to escape
> some of the bad stuff on the internet and go to a safer place,'"
> Weinberg says. "And that's where we see ourselves." 
> 

duckduck is a flawed search engine. Slow as hell, often does not even 
load. How you know they are not tracking you?? Google is EVIL, only a 
matter of time before TRUMP goes after all the corrupt companies.

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: news@netfront.net ---

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#913

In article <XnsAA0D2F53E4AF1awerwkwhodoneew92d@202.81.252.44>,
whodunit  <whodunit@notme.org> wrote:
>duckduck is a flawed search engine. Slow as hell, often does not even 
>load. 

On what world?  It's been working just fine for me the past few months I've
been using it.

(Way to not trim quotes before posting, BTW.  See what was done above, and
learn from the example.)

  _/_
 / v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail)
(IIGS( https://alfter.us/           Top-posting!
 \_^_/                              >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?

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#920

["Followup-To:" header set to comp.misc.]
On 2019-03-08, Scott Alfter <scott@alfter.diespammersdie.us> wrote:
> In article <XnsAA0D2F53E4AF1awerwkwhodoneew92d@202.81.252.44>,
> whodunit  <whodunit@notme.org> wrote:
>>duckduck is a flawed search engine. Slow as hell, often does not even 
>>load. 
>
> On what world?  It's been working just fine for me the past few months I've
> been using it.

Ditto - I've been using it exclusively for about 5 years I'd say, without a
glitch.  Only revert to the Goog when absolutely necessary.

I'm addicted to navigating with J and K through the entries - so lovely.

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#914

On Fri, 08 Mar 2019 20:39:06 +0000, whodunit wrote:

> duckduck is a flawed search engine. Slow as hell, often does not even
> load. How you know they are not tracking you?? Google is EVIL, only a
> matter of time before TRUMP goes after all the corrupt companies.

Trump won't manage it. His own corruption will sink him fiurst.

-- 
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
 http://www.mirrorservice.org

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#917

On 2019-03-08, Bob Eager <news0073@eager.cx> wrote:
> Trump won't manage it. His own corruption will sink him fiurst.

Perhaps, but compared to the Clintons he's a saint.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Roger Blake (Posts from Google Groups killfiled due to excess spam.)

  NSA sedition and treason        -- http://www.DeathToNSAthugs.com
  Don't talk to cops!             -- http://www.DontTalkToCops.com
  Badges don't grant extra rights -- http://www.CopBlock.org
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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#918

On Sat, 09 Mar 2019 02:15:50 +0000, Roger Blake wrote:

> On 2019-03-08, Bob Eager <news0073@eager.cx> wrote:
>> Trump won't manage it. His own corruption will sink him fiurst.
> 
> Perhaps, but compared to the Clintons he's a saint.

I do hope you are joking.



-- 
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
 http://www.mirrorservice.org

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#919

On 2019-03-09, Roger Blake <rogblake@iname.invalid> wrote:
> On 2019-03-08, Bob Eager <news0073@eager.cx> wrote:
>> Trump won't manage it. His own corruption will sink him fiurst.
>
> Perhaps, but compared to the Clintons he's a saint.

I do wish people would come up with a new logical fallacy. I'm bored
with "whataboutery".


-- 
Today is Pungenday, the 68th day of Chaos in the YOLD 3185
'O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas,
            who was once handsome and tall as you.'

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#924

Roger Blake  <rogblake@iname.invalid> wrote:
>On 2019-03-08, Bob Eager <news0073@eager.cx> wrote:
>> Trump won't manage it. His own corruption will sink him fiurst.
>
>Perhaps, but compared to the Clintons he's a saint.


"Gee, putting my head in this stamping press while it's running sure seems
 dangerous!"

"Oh, don't worry, it's as hazardous as putting your head in the bandsaw."

--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

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#925

In <q6b3ec$32d$1@panix2.panix.com> kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) writes:

>Roger Blake  <rogblake@iname.invalid> wrote:
>>On 2019-03-08, Bob Eager <news0073@eager.cx> wrote:
>>> Trump won't manage it. His own corruption will sink him fiurst.
>>
>>Perhaps, but compared to the Clintons he's a saint.


>"Gee, putting my head in this stamping press while it's running sure seems
> dangerous!"

>"Oh, don't worry, it's as hazardous as putting your head in the bandsaw."

"Do you expect mne to talk?"


-- 
_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
		     dannyb@panix.com 
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]

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#915

In comp.misc, whodunit  <whodunit@notme.org> wrote:
> "(p)ing^~dvox:::::::::z" <dvox@hotbot.com> wrote in
> news:q45eo5$4hi$2@neodomea5yrhcabc.onion: 
> > 2019 may finally be the year for 'The Search Engine That Doesn't Track
> > You' 
> > <https://medium.com/s/story/nothing-can-stop-google-duckduckgo-is-tryin
> > g-anyway-718eb7391423> 

Medium: the text site that likes to track your mouse movements for some
reason. Definitely not high on my list of privacy friendly places to
find content. Fortunately it does work well in lynx.

> > Until 2011, Weinberg was DuckDuckGo's sole full-time employee. That
> > year, he pushed to expand the company. He bought a billboard in
> > Google's backyard of San Francisco that proudly proclaimed, "Google
> > tracks you. We don't."

I don't remember when I started using DuckDuckGo. My personal archive
of netnews posts shows 2011 was the first year I mentioned it in a post.

> > Using DuckDuckGo can feel like relearning to walk after you've spent a
> > decade flying. On Google, a search for, say, "vape shop" yields a map
> > of vape shops in my area. On DuckDuckGo, that same search returns a
> > list of online vaporizer retailers. The difference, of course, is the
> > data: Google knows that I'm in Durham, North Carolina. As far as
> > DuckDuckGo is concerned, I may as well be on the moon. 

Yeah, sure. But I've had DDG as default search engine for at least four
years now and gotten used to typing "$item store $city $state". So when
I accidently use Google it feels kinda creepy, not like "flying".

> duckduck is a flawed search engine. Slow as hell, often does not even 
> load. How you know they are not tracking you?? Google is EVIL, only a 
> matter of time before TRUMP goes after all the corrupt companies.

I have never had DDG fail to load, and I doubt you've tried the wifi in
Hell. Hard to prove they aren't tracking you, but easy to prove Google
is tracking you. It's an easy choice for me. Want to completely stop
Internet companies from tracking you? Don't use the Internet.

It's really hard though, since other people use the Internet on your
behalf all the time. Consider my mother-in-law, who doesn't want to use
her credit card "on the Internet". So she calls, say, an airline to buy
tickets and reads out the card number over the phone. Ignoring that the
person on the other end is probably using a VoIP phone, they are just
sitting in front of a computer with a special web portal opened up and
typing her card number into their web page, to send over the Internet.

Elijah
------
ditto paying an electric bill

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#916

In comp.misc Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
> In comp.misc, whodunit  <whodunit@notme.org> wrote:
>> "(p)ing^~dvox:::::::::z" <dvox@hotbot.com> wrote in
>> news:q45eo5$4hi$2@neodomea5yrhcabc.onion: 
>> > 2019 may finally be the year for 'The Search Engine That Doesn't Track
>> > You' 
>> > <https://medium.com/s/story/nothing-can-stop-google-duckduckgo-is-tryin
>> > g-anyway-718eb7391423> 
> 
> Medium: the text site that likes to track your mouse movements for some
> reason. Definitely not high on my list of privacy friendly places to
> find content. Fortunately it does work well in lynx.

Ah, oh well it works well in Dillo too. Though the images didn't need
to be that big.

>> > Until 2011, Weinberg was DuckDuckGo's sole full-time employee. That
>> > year, he pushed to expand the company. He bought a billboard in
>> > Google's backyard of San Francisco that proudly proclaimed, "Google
>> > tracks you. We don't."
> 
> I don't remember when I started using DuckDuckGo. My personal archive
> of netnews posts shows 2011 was the first year I mentioned it in a post.
> 
>> > Using DuckDuckGo can feel like relearning to walk after you've spent a
>> > decade flying. On Google, a search for, say, "vape shop" yields a map
>> > of vape shops in my area. On DuckDuckGo, that same search returns a
>> > list of online vaporizer retailers. The difference, of course, is the
>> > data: Google knows that I'm in Durham, North Carolina. As far as
>> > DuckDuckGo is concerned, I may as well be on the moon. 
> 
> Yeah, sure. But I've had DDG as default search engine for at least four
> years now and gotten used to typing "$item store $city $state". So when
> I accidently use Google it feels kinda creepy, not like "flying".

I've got no idea when I switched to it from Google either, but I don't
remember Google ever knowing where I was. If a site tries to work it
out from my IP address it is out by at least a few hundred kilometers
(depending on which capital city it guesses that I'm in) - that only
makes results less useful. Maybe they weren't doing that in Australia
back when I was using it, or maybe I found a way to disable it because
it kept giving me results from Sydney. In any case I've never known
anything other than "$item store $city $state $country" (the last one
is permanently set as a URL parameter in Dillo (I don't think I found
a way to do that in Firefox with its silly new "search engines as
extensions" system), but it still pays to hammer it in).

Hell, most local stores either don't have websites or their website
is just a logo with some outdated information from when some
"websites4U" operation built it for them, and an Email address / 
contact form that nobody ever reads. But I'm getting off-topic.

>> duckduck is a flawed search engine. Slow as hell, often does not even 
>> load. How you know they are not tracking you?? Google is EVIL, only a 
>> matter of time before TRUMP goes after all the corrupt companies.
> 
> I have never had DDG fail to load, and I doubt you've tried the wifi in
> Hell.

Google does seem to be unreasonably faster to load than any other
site on many internet connections. Presumably mainly due to specific
handling by the ISP. They're probably also a lot more resilient
against DDOS attacks (I think I once watched an interview where a
Google employee said that their servers were powerful enough to
"pretty much absorb anything" in that regard).

I find DDG fast enough though, and it's even faster using the
"lite" version in Dillo. I may remember it being down on a couple
of occasions in the past, but it's hardly "often". It's a lot more
reliable than my home internet connection is, though that's not
saying much.

-- 
__          __
#_ < |\| |< _#

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#921

Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote in
news:eli$1903081632@qaz.wtf: 

> In comp.misc, whodunit  <whodunit@notme.org> wrote:
>> "(p)ing^~dvox:::::::::z" <dvox@hotbot.com> wrote in
>> news:q45eo5$4hi$2@neodomea5yrhcabc.onion: 
>> > 2019 may finally be the year for 'The Search Engine That Doesn't
>> > Track You' 
>> > <https://medium.com/s/story/nothing-can-stop-google-duckduckgo-is-tr
>> > yin g-anyway-718eb7391423> 
> 
> Medium: the text site that likes to track your mouse movements for
> some reason. Definitely not high on my list of privacy friendly places
> to find content. Fortunately it does work well in lynx.
> 
>> > Until 2011, Weinberg was DuckDuckGo's sole full-time employee. That
>> > year, he pushed to expand the company. He bought a billboard in
>> > Google's backyard of San Francisco that proudly proclaimed, "Google
>> > tracks you. We don't."
> 
> I don't remember when I started using DuckDuckGo. My personal archive
> of netnews posts shows 2011 was the first year I mentioned it in a
> post. 
> 
>> > Using DuckDuckGo can feel like relearning to walk after you've
>> > spent a decade flying. On Google, a search for, say, "vape shop"
>> > yields a map of vape shops in my area. On DuckDuckGo, that same
>> > search returns a list of online vaporizer retailers. The
>> > difference, of course, is the data: Google knows that I'm in
>> > Durham, North Carolina. As far as DuckDuckGo is concerned, I may as
>> > well be on the moon. 
> 
> Yeah, sure. But I've had DDG as default search engine for at least
> four years now and gotten used to typing "$item store $city $state".
> So when I accidently use Google it feels kinda creepy, not like
> "flying". 
> 
>> duckduck is a flawed search engine. Slow as hell, often does not even
>> load. How you know they are not tracking you?? Google is EVIL, only a
>> matter of time before TRUMP goes after all the corrupt companies.
> 
> I have never had DDG fail to load, and I doubt you've tried the wifi
> in Hell. Hard to prove they aren't tracking you, but easy to prove
> Google is tracking you. It's an easy choice for me. Want to completely
> stop Internet companies from tracking you? Don't use the Internet.
> 
> It's really hard though, since other people use the Internet on your
> behalf all the time. Consider my mother-in-law, who doesn't want to
> use her credit card "on the Internet". So she calls, say, an airline
> to buy tickets and reads out the card number over the phone. Ignoring
> that the person on the other end is probably using a VoIP phone, they
> are just sitting in front of a computer with a special web portal
> opened up and typing her card number into their web page, to send over
> the Internet. 
> 
> Elijah
> ------
> ditto paying an electric bill

If you do an exhaustive search there are MANY other search engines that 
do not track you that are FASTER than DUCK, better than DUCK. Duck sucks, 
slow as hell and does not give good results, no advanced searching, 
doesn't follow normal advanced syntax.

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#922

In comp.misc nunnurbiz <whodunit@notme.org> wrote:
> If you do an exhaustive search there are MANY other search engines that 
> do not track you that are FASTER than DUCK, better than DUCK. Duck sucks, 
> slow as hell and does not give good results, no advanced searching, 
> doesn't follow normal advanced syntax.

I attempted an exhaustive search a while ago when DDG search links
stopped working in my preferred web browser, Dillo. I found many
search engines with worse results than DDG, some that were much
slower and unreliable, but none besides Google that could provide
equivalently relevant results for my test search terms.

Of course maybe the good ones were all incompatible with Dillo as
well, in which case I wouldn't have looked at them long enough to
remember them. It looks like Bing might have worked, but M$ is no
better than Google in my opinion.

Thankfully DDG eventually got the URL parameter working, which was
always meant to disable the feature that made it incompatible with
Dillo, but had stopped working for some reason.

-- 
__          __
#_ < |\| |< _#

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#926

not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) wrote in
news:q699ol$15f0$1@gioia.aioe.org: 

> In comp.misc nunnurbiz <whodunit@notme.org> wrote:
>> If you do an exhaustive search there are MANY other search engines
>> that do not track you that are FASTER than DUCK, better than DUCK.
>> Duck sucks, slow as hell and does not give good results, no advanced
>> searching, doesn't follow normal advanced syntax.
> 
> I attempted an exhaustive search a while ago when DDG search links
> stopped working in my preferred web browser, Dillo. I found many
> search engines with worse results than DDG, some that were much
> slower and unreliable, but none besides Google that could provide
> equivalently relevant results for my test search terms.
> 
> Of course maybe the good ones were all incompatible with Dillo as
> well, in which case I wouldn't have looked at them long enough to
> remember them. It looks like Bing might have worked, but M$ is no
> better than Google in my opinion.
> 
> Thankfully DDG eventually got the URL parameter working, which was
> always meant to disable the feature that made it incompatible with
> Dillo, but had stopped working for some reason.
> 

Sorry but you're wrong. Duck does not play well with TOR. And there's an 
extra step to divert you to their "non-javascript" engine. Ok if you want 
to use javascript, but there goes your privacy. Duck fails to load 
frequently and when it does load it's slow. YOu cannot use advanced 
syntax (at least none I have found) and it just returns wrong or 
incomplete results. At least with google you can use advanced syntax, but 
that's not a big enough reason to use EVIL google. If you guys cannot 
find the good engines out there, your not looking/testing very well.

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#927

On 2019-03-13, nunnurbiz <whodunit@notme.org> wrote:

> If you guys cannot 
> find the good engines out there, your not looking/testing very well.

And off to the 'tard farm with you.

-- 
Today is Boomtime, the 72nd day of Chaos in the YOLD 3185
'O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas,
            who was once handsome and tall as you.'

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#928

In comp.misc nunnurbiz <whodunit@notme.org> wrote:
> not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) wrote in
> news:q699ol$15f0$1@gioia.aioe.org: 
>> In comp.misc nunnurbiz <whodunit@notme.org> wrote:
>>> If you do an exhaustive search there are MANY other search engines
>>> that do not track you that are FASTER than DUCK, better than DUCK.
>>> Duck sucks, slow as hell and does not give good results, no advanced
>>> searching, doesn't follow normal advanced syntax.
>> 
>> I attempted an exhaustive search a while ago when DDG search links
>> stopped working in my preferred web browser, Dillo. I found many
>> search engines with worse results than DDG, some that were much
>> slower and unreliable, but none besides Google that could provide
>> equivalently relevant results for my test search terms.
>> 
>> Of course maybe the good ones were all incompatible with Dillo as
>> well, in which case I wouldn't have looked at them long enough to
>> remember them. It looks like Bing might have worked, but M$ is no
>> better than Google in my opinion.
>> 
>> Thankfully DDG eventually got the URL parameter working, which was
>> always meant to disable the feature that made it incompatible with
>> Dillo, but had stopped working for some reason.
>> 
> 
> Sorry but you're wrong. Duck does not play well with TOR.

It was set as the default search engine in the TOR browser!

> And there's an extra step to divert you to their
> "non-javascript" engine.

Oh no, an extra step! Better just go and find another search engine
rather than simply adding "&kd=-1" to the search URL.

> Ok if you want 
> to use javascript, but there goes your privacy. Duck fails to load 
> frequently and when it does load it's slow.

Their server must like me a lot more than you then.

> YOu cannot use advanced syntax (at least none I have found) and it
> just returns wrong or incomplete results.

You don't say what you consider "advanced syntax", but:
https://duck.co/help/results/syntax

> At least with google you can use advanced syntax, but 
> that's not a big enough reason to use EVIL google. If you guys cannot 
> find the good engines out there, your not looking/testing very well.

I think I looked hard, and you're hardly going to convince me
otherwise while keeping your reported assortment of wonderful search
engine links to yourself.

-- 
__          __
#_ < |\| |< _#

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#929

In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
> In comp.misc nunnurbiz <whodunit@notme.org> wrote:
>> At least with google you can use advanced syntax, but 
>> that's not a big enough reason to use EVIL google. If you guys cannot 
>> find the good engines out there, your not looking/testing very well.
> I think I looked hard, and you're hardly going to convince me
> otherwise while keeping your reported assortment of wonderful search
> engine links to yourself.

Alta Vista, 1995 version, has the best advanced search.

Change my mind.

Elijah
------
s/, has/, had/

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#931

On 2019-03-14, Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
> In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
>> In comp.misc nunnurbiz <whodunit@notme.org> wrote:
>>> At least with google you can use advanced syntax, but 
>>> that's not a big enough reason to use EVIL google. If you guys cannot 
>>> find the good engines out there, your not looking/testing very well.
>> I think I looked hard, and you're hardly going to convince me
>> otherwise while keeping your reported assortment of wonderful search
>> engine links to yourself.
>
> Alta Vista, 1995 version, has the best advanced search.
>
> Change my mind.

No argument from me; I remember it fondly.  Does any search engine even
offer advanced search anymore?  You used to be able to do some smart
things with google, but the interface has dumbed it down now to the
point where it's not clear if the functionality even still exists.

OK, scratch the question. Just searched for it myself and discovered
this, which is infinitely more usable than the regular Goog search page:

https://www.google.com/advanced_search

Also:

https://search.yahoo.com/web/advanced

https://www.lifewire.com/bing-advanced-search-3482817

Ha, anybody remember Dogpile? Somehow it's still around.
http://dogpile.com

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#930

In article <XnsAA118431A1E6Bwwkkw888iaiddkj@46.165.242.91>,
nunnurbiz  <whodunit@notme.org> wrote:
>Sorry but you're wrong. Duck does not play well with TOR.

https://home.alfter.us/s/mJ9GLwZ7wMSEpyZ
https://home.alfter.us/s/PN2QmnWx4BXmnRq

Not sure if trolling, or just ignorant.

>If you guys cannot find the good engines out there, your [sic] not
>looking/testing very well.

[citation needed]

You've been asked more than once to name names, yet you still haven't done
so.

Now I'm pretty sure...you're just a troll, and a rather dimwitted one at
that.

* PLONK *

  _/_
 / v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail)
(IIGS( https://alfter.us/           Top-posting!
 \_^_/                              >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?

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