
Improving DuckDuckGo - fghtr
https://duck.co/help/privacy/atb
======
turc1656
If anyone from DDG is watching this thread, thank you for your product and
your commitment to privacy. As a privacy-conscious individual, I greatly
appreciate your work. Is there a way to donate? I know you already monetize
your product through ads, but I use an ad-blocker (among other things)
because, well, most of the internet does not operate with the same values that
you do. Since you aren't making any money off of me, I am willing to
donate/pay for your service but cannot find any place on your site to do so.

~~~
nashashmi
White list their page.

~~~
ObsoleteNerd
I vehemently disagree with advertising in general, and go to efforts to make
sure myself and my wife/kids see ads as little as possible (Pi-Hole, adblock
plugins, no TV other than as a NAS screen, etc). I very much believe it is a
form of malicious brainwashing.

But, I very much want to reward the people who create the things I use.

So I'll never whitelist any site or service, but I'll absolutely donate or
make sure they get paid in other ways (and usually willingly donate more than
they'd get from showing me ads).

~~~
kraig911
I agree with your position. I'm trying to figure out how to limit my kid from
seeing any ads at all. Where can I get more information for this beyond
adblock and host file manipulation?

~~~
ObsoleteNerd
I have Pi-Hole on the network that every device in the house runs through,
with extra blocklists and a year or so of manual tweaking, that covers most
stuff. I also run ad block plugins just in case, don't allow commercial TV
(they only watch Netflix or ABC Kids app), and that pretty much covers
everything for our family.

It's also just a thing we keep in mind and work around in life. We won't use
any service that has ads, or any site that finds ways around the Pi Hole, or
watch shows/movies with heavy product placement, etc etc. It's just part of
mine and my wife's core beliefs (privacy in general) so we just guide our kids
towards "good" content and taught them from the minute they could understand,
that "ads are bad, we don't like ads".

~~~
masonic

      don't allow commercial TV (they only watch Netflix or ABC Kids app
    

How are Netflix and ABC Kids not "commercial"?

Even PBS is "commercial", given the growing practice of underwriter ads.

~~~
princetman
They probably meant TV shows with commercial break. Not sure about ABC but
Netflix you can watch uninterrupted without ads.

------
brentadamson
I run [https://jivesearch.com](https://jivesearch.com), so I might be biased.
The single biggest thing they can do to improve their product is open source
everything. They've instead decided to move away from that by freezing their
instant answers with no explanation as to if/when they will re-open source
them. Makes me question their commitment to privacy and transparency.

~~~
h1d
Won't open sourcing the code make sites get to cheat their ranking by trying
to make it rank logic friendly?

~~~
rvnx
No because DDG is a frontend to Bing results. The ads are different (DDG shows
Yahoo ads, which also shows Bing ads) and Bing shows Bing ads only.

~~~
phinnaeus
Source?

~~~
Kiro
[https://duck.co/help/results/sources](https://duck.co/help/results/sources)

> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which
> we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo)
> and Bing.

They do not have their own search index.

~~~
mrweasel
Really... You read the last part of that paragraph, but no the first?

>In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These
include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers,
DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in
our answer indexes).

Kinda silly to have a crawler that doesn't index anything.

~~~
Kiro
They have an index but just for their Instant Answers (for which they have 400
sources) and not the organic search results. The last paragraph is what's
relevant to the actual search index.

------
driverdan
Goal #1 should be high quality search results while respecting privacy.
Everything else should be secondary. The biggest thing DDG could do to improve
their product is make it quick and easy for users to provide feedback about
bad search results. I'd be happy to report searches that Google gives better
results for but they don't have a mechanism to do so.

For example, search DDG for "odroid". The official domain is hardkernel.com.
The first result from hardkernel comes up at #6 for me. I'd love to have a way
to suggest the official domain for a product like that so it shows up as #1.

~~~
pbreit
Are DDG users comfortable knowing that their search results are always going
to be inferior?

~~~
iKenshu
I really don't think that the results on DDG are inferior, but I'm comfortable
with the results. If I want something more personalize or near for my
location(Venezuela is not available on DDG) I just go to Google directly or
with !g

~~~
pbreit
Search is significantly better when it can consider previous search history.

~~~
PavlovsCat
I actually think that breaks it, I like it better when everybody gets the same
results for the same queries. People (via algorithms or directly) shaping what
others get to see, rather than configuration and user empowerment, is
something I reject.

~~~
pbreit
I used to think that but now I see very little value in it to the current
searcher. Why would you ever care what other people get?

~~~
PavlovsCat
To have that be part of the common world. Just like I wouldn't want Wikipedia
to show a different version of the world to every visitor.

------
wpdev_63
I love duckduckgo and I feel I can almost replace google completely with it. I
only have the following comments on it.

1\. They're hosted in the US. I wish the company would pick up and move to a
country not within the 14 eyes and out of jurisdiction of the cyber super
powers(US, China, and Russia). Maybe panama? At least move it virtually with a
warrant canary in place.

2\. The search results need better contrasting colors for glancing through.
Google is noticeable better with it's bolder fonts and better typeface/colors.
I feel this would be easy place to innovate in over google.

3\. Better site specific searches. Right now you can search a specific site
for results. For example right now you can search specific sites using
`site:ycombinator.com rust programming langugage` and you will only get
results from hackernews. It works great right now and I use daily in my
workflows but it would be great to do this from the search bar for firefox or
some better way.

Search engines have _alot_ of areas they can innovate in and I feel google
with all its controversy(prism program, chinese state surveillance, etc) that
many people would prefer to have their searches(and their life stories) in a
company that values their users privacy to a fanatical extent.

~~~
biztos
> a country not within the 14 eyes

I hadn't heard that term; in case anyone else hadn't, this page explains it
pretty well:

[https://restoreprivacy.com/5-eyes-9-eyes-14-eyes/](https://restoreprivacy.com/5-eyes-9-eyes-14-eyes/)

~~~
cyphunk
Is the OP Swiss and wants it hosted where he/she lives? I'd be fine with that
as an alternative to US, but do not understand why that would be better than,
say, Sweden

------
ericand
I wish we had clear/consistent vocabulary for talking about privacy and
personal data captured. This seemed pretty clear but it did take a lot of text
to explain it and in the end, I still wanted to know if sessions are tagged
together such that you can recreate sessions? Can you associate multiple
sessions in anyway? You can tell a lot about an individual even if you don't
know who they are from information like this.

------
rudedogg
One request I have is to be able to filter results by longer time ranges. If
that was added I could switch over.

~~~
gelatocar
Yeah agreed. As a js dev any search that isn't limited to 1 year is pretty
much useless, but 1 month isn't enough.

------
saagarjha
> All of these requests are all fully encrypted in transit to DuckDuckGo, such
> that nobody else but us can see them. And like with all other requests to
> DuckDuckGo, there is no personally identifiable information embedded in
> them, and we do not store IP addresses associated with them.

They say they don’t Store IPs, but every request presumably has one. So it
would be very easy for them to change this if they so wished, at which point
their data collection wouldn’t be anonymous. As much as I like DuckDuckGo, I’d
really like it if I could trust that they protect my privacy without having to
trust them that they are doing so.

~~~
dannyobrien
It's hard for Duck Duck Go to deliberately put themselves in a position where
they're unable to collect IP addresses.

You could, however, use them via their Tor onion service:
[https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/](https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/)

It took me a while to find out somewhere where this is really run by them
rather than a third-party proxy, but this seems to confirm it:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1hdqs6/weve_upd...](https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1hdqs6/weve_updated_our_tor_hidden_service_to_work_over/)

------
dna_polymerase
> To be clear, this means we cannot ever tell what individual people are doing
> since everyone is anonymous

Nope. This means that they tell us that they cannot tell what individual
people are doing. But as they said right in the sentence before that, we are
supposed to believe that they don't store IP addresses.

> And like with all other requests to DuckDuckGo, there is no personally
> identifiable information embedded in them, and we do not store IP addresses
> associated with them.

That is an outright lie even. HTTP Headers contain enough data already to make
individuals distinguishable. Add some data science and you got some fancy
profiles of your users.

I don't know what's going on with HN and DDG, but seriously is everyone just
buying into this marketing bs? Why should I trust DDG with their claims about
privacy instead of Google, Bing, or any other company?

------
visualstudio
DuckDuckGo should start an email service.

~~~
huac
How are they going to make money from that?

~~~
shmerl
Charge a monthly / yearly fee?

~~~
huac
if you are willing to pay for private email, why not any of the dozens of
existing ones? e.g. protonmail or fast mail? there is little differentiation
available for them here.

------
bernardlunn
I love “private by design”. It was easy to switch and results are good enough.
As a publisher I do NOT like the cash donations model - too feudal for me.. I
think donating time to improve product - as they are asking - makes more
sense. Not sure I see value in them open sourcing their software. In short, I
think DDG is great and should keep doing more of what they do.

------
100-xyz
I used to use duckduckgo and liked it, till the Chinese government blocked it
to protect me from the evils of the internet :-)

------
sbhn
DDG sells your attention, just like all of them. It’s nothing about privacy,
or selling your profile. You search a term, you get ads. When they say ‘We
don’t sell your data’, it is a distraction, they are selling your immediate
attention. DDG is part of the yahoo-Microsoft search alliance. To advertise on
DDG, use Bing Ads.

------
bredren
Glad to see they built their product-use data tracking tools in house.

------
ct0
Proudly using DDG search over the competitor!

------
jordache
i tried to change google to duckduckgo. it was not sustainable. immediately
noticeable poor search results. Searching an address brings me to a subpar
open map site,

~~~
zapzupnz
I don't know why you're being downvoted, because your experience is as valid
as anybody else's. I'm with you, I can't switch to DDG because my productivity
tanks with the poorer results than Google.

I tried Startpage as a sort of in-between solution, but that site's so dang
slow.

~~~
craftyguy
> I don't know why you're being downvoted

HN users use the downvote to show disagreement. Ideally it would only be used
to bury comments that were off topic, spam, etc, but the only system I've seen
with a correct implementation of this is
[https://lobste.rs](https://lobste.rs).

Edit: This comment is a case in point since I've been downvoted less than 30
seconds after posting it. Ha. I challenge someone to prove me wrong.

------
singularity2001
If anyone from DDG is watching this thread, please stop "auto-correcting" my
queries!!!!! "you" "know" what I mean

~~~
mrweasel
Google does the same thing, and it even leaves out words if it believe that is
won't give you (enough?) results.

But I agree, it's rare that auto-correcting helps me, more often than not it
changes my search to something wrong.

------
musaffa
I'm waiting for DDG to integrate dates in the search results. Date is crucial
to understand how new or old the content is. This is one of the reasons why
I'm not using it.

------
esturk
While we have a duckduckgo thread going, does anyone know when duckduckhack is
coming back?

------
inasring
could you determine who somebody is by evaluating the decision tree at each
split?

------
nojvek
I would buy a router with Adblock filters enabled.

------
agumonkey
Very nice ideas. I'll stay on ddg

------
patrickbolle
Seems completely reasonable to me.

------
netclockin
thanks ddg for improving user experience and privacy unlike other search
engines. No wonder folks are not only blocking but using things like adnauseam
- [https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam](https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam)

