DuckDuckGo is only private if you trust their word.
Over the years they continue to refuse access for a trusted third-party auditor to review their infrastructure and validate (or not) their claims of privacy.
The preference of Android to place DDG in Europe (31 out of 31 countries) is strange when considering privacy as argument. Then is placed this "info.com" as second option on all European countries (31 out of 31 countries) which is virtually unheard about, and again a US-based service which again raises eyebrows on privacy.
Europe-wide has a search engine that deserves our preference, and that is http://qwant.com
Precisely because it is built and hosted in Europe. Yet, it is displayed as the last option and only as an option for 8 out of 31 european countries. Very strange. Talking from Germany, the preference here would be http://ecosia.com
Not doubting you, but do you have any sources for your claims?
I will use Qwant in the future but at the minute it's not suitable (IMO) for daily usage.
Ecosia seems like a great idea, but these kind of 'Search and earn' sites have always seemed like a scam to me and I can't find any reason to trust Ecosia over DDG.
I'm a software auditor in Europe (per times consulting the European commission itself), mostly for open source licenses but also for cybersec and privacy matters.
This topic with DDG is recurring since years. You cannot verify the infrastructure, it is not hosted on EU-bounded servers and they have been asked for cooperation. Nothing moved as far I follow.
With Ecosia you are right. The point is that Ecosia accountable to European Law in case of scam. You can trust germans to close down the service if ever deemed to be a scam.
I agree about Qwant being unsuitable for daily usage. I had to stop using it after entering a search query via the omnibar in Firefox would sometimes fail, apparently at random, and redirect me to Qwant's homepage instead of the search results.
> to refuse access for a trusted third-party auditor to review their infrastructure and validate (or not) their claims of privacy.
Which company would accept (and pay for that) given there's no legal requirement for it?
Here's a better test: DDG sets exactly one cookie in my browser, with a short value (not unique enough to track anything). Makes me trust them more than some BS popup saying "we care about your privacy"
I don't see why I wouldn't trust DDG in relation to their alternatives
> Which company would accept (and pay for that) given there's no legal requirement for it?
Maybe relevant for a company whose business model is built around the promise of preserving end-user privacy?
> I don't see why
Data storage and network communication occurring inside the European space alone, rather than sending packets from European users to elsewhere unknown. Being fully accountable to European law, with base offices and employees in Europe so they are subject to the same data-protection rules as other locally-based companies.
When looking at other alternatives such as Ecosia, Qwant: they do offer this and yet are seldom presented as a search engine option by Android. Strange.
Companies that are US-based can be depended upon to leak like a sieve with very little prompting. Given that, the EU option is the smart option. In the EU, there is at least a modicum of accountability and some expectation in the law (in theory but more importantly in practice) that people are respected and left alone.
Hadn't heard of Qwant. Looks like they do their own indexing, which is good to see. Definitely an engine to keep an eye on.
Ecosia is just repackaged Bing, ostensibly with a second filter/ranking pass over Bing's results iirc. Is there much difference between the two from an end-user perspective, beyond the ecology gimmick?
Ecosia is a small Berlin startup. They are profitable and happy to just relay the results from other search engines.
Qwant is far bigger. Aims to be a complete replacement for Google in Europe with their own datasets. They have difficulties in funding and their survival is mostly depending on public funding and eventually being accepted as default choice for companies across Europe.
From that perspective, it makes a huge difference when more people become aware that independent options exist.
Can't we have an open source search engine with publicly sourced "indices"? Anyone who wants can then crawl the web and build a graph of parts of the internet. The search part and the crawling code would be open source. What's the problem?
Ecosia is from what I can tell a frontend for Bing. That is again a US-based solution, even if their veneer is from somewhere else (is it? I can't find it easily).
As for Qwant, it says it's based in France but I know nothing about it.
Just from the face of it, it's not clear that these solutions are better (Qwant is a maybe and Ecosia is a definitely not). This ambiguity coupled with their relatively unknown nature could be one reason why the EU did what it has done.
Does it matter though? If you want some semblance of privacy, use VPN + Tor while searching anything, and make sure no personally identifiable information goes through it. Every company has to adhere to its local law, so expecting privacy is naive.
DDG's advantage is much less bloat and almost as good results as Google (in some areas arguably better), while not feeding their personalized ad machine. Qwant is worth trying as well.
It's somehow funny to see that Bing search results are so successful when packaged with privacy in mind into DuckDuckGo. I don't like bing search results, especially for Europe. They are just bad for many local things.
The only other search engine beside Google which is interesting and surprising for me is maybe Yandex. It's also not as good as Google in (most of) Europe but it's interesting to see that many things are not censored away in comparison to Bing and Google (political correctness, copyright, nsfw etc. etc.). I'm happy there is an alternative with different culture and jurisdiction.
> It's somehow funny to see that Bing search results are so successful when packaged with privacy in mind into DuckDuckGo.
I'm kind of ambivalent about the privacy of DDG vs Bing (maybe I shouldn't be, but since I use DDG anyway, I haven't done the research) - I simply prefer the UI of DDG over Bing.
> I don't like bing search results, especially for Europe. They are just bad for many local things.
I wish Google was less aggressively local. I pretty regularly search for things on Google where I'm looking for the global/most well-known instance, and Google directs me to weird local results that I've never heard of and don't care about.
Oh that is another issue on Google. The local bubble is sometimes too much in Google and hard to escape. The problem is most people don't realize that!
I moved between countries in the recent years and also changed language in the OS from German to English (seems that is one switch of many) and suddenly many search results changed.
> but it's interesting to see that many things are not censored away in comparison to Bing and Google (political correctness, copyright, nsfw etc. etc.).
I am not aware that there is a censorship of things that are deemed 'politically incorrect' by either bing or google, and Yandex does comply with European copyright law and other EU legislation like the right-to-be-forgotten.
As an illusory example only, and definitely not as an endorsement, and chosen only because it is the extremes of acceptable speach that are most likely to be censured; consider these search results for "Daily Stormer"
Am a staunch gun-control type, but there certainly has been evidence of google censoring political causes they disagree with. This is not the way forward.
It's incredibly hard to have a discussion with someone who clearly has a point about the masses being dictated what they see/think by a Google search.
These sort of things do not advance civil discourse and only serve to inflame it in an "us against them" mentality.
There are differences in search results for sure. Political correctness is also a very broad field. Depending on topic it is sometimes biased and even filtered (e.g. nsfw content) by Google/Bing or search results in Google are too much SEO hacked in comparison to Yandex on first pages. I've never analysed in deep and don't have numbers but for some searches it is worth to check also Yandex.
But to be fair Google is often better... it depends on the topic you search for.
When I was in Russia, I was constantly surprised by the quality of Yandex's services. Their map data was far superior to Google Maps and their cab app felt better than Uber.
Do you have an objective (or at least intersubjective) measure for search result quality which could provide some evidence for your claim?
Right now you are grounding on anecdotal evidence which is generally accepted to be a quite weak form of argument.
I am asking out if interest because I am a happy user of ddg and wonder what I am missing out on? Are my needs so different from other users that I don’t have the issue that you are describing at all? Are you sure it’s not just a “this is slightly different so it must be worse” type situation?
Notice that there are entirely no NSFW images on DDG. This is a big hole right where content should be, and basically voids all claims to anti-censorship street cred.
I suffer through DDG to avoid Google, but it's not pretty. Especially for terms with ambiguous meaning, DDG just performs way worse than Google.
For example, the tensorflow terminology for reducing dimensionality is "squeeze" and the scipy Gaussian distributing is called "normal".
A DDG query for "python squeeze normal" shows me stuff about the animal. Google correctly infers that I want programming advice.
I also really don't get why when I search for a TensorFlow function name, DDG will show me random pages with code examples instead of the official manual page for that function, which has my exact search query as meta title and as top h1.
Something that doesn't sit well with me about DuckDuckGo is their hidden use of affiliate links to Amazon and eBay. Fundamentally search engines are vulnerable to predatory business models. Privacy is one issue. Providing financially motivated information is another. To my knowledge (would love to hear more), Google is pretty up front about what is an ad and what isn't while DuckDuckGo covertly sells you to Amazon when you might want to buy something.
While DuckDuckGo seems to be enjoying some halo effect in some communities at the moment (Google once enjoyed a similar glow), I think that general skepticism is probably a healthy orientation toward search engines.
Amazon links that appear in the organic results are not affiliated.
eBay links that appear in the organic results may be affiliated. As per our policy, this has no impact on their organic ranking or appearance - and no information is shared with eBay.
We agree that general skepticism is healthy, and try to make clear that any element which has its placement changed, or elevated because of a financial incentive is labelled as an ad.
If there is something unclear about that, we'd always love to hear more user feedback!
Fair - I had not noticed the ad labels before. Thanks for the response.
Putting the label in the top right corner instead of the bottom left does feel like a bit of a dark pattern. DuckDuckGo's page layout clearly reflects the classic F pattern of visual attention, and the ad label is not very prominent.
I don't know what you intend "hidden" to mean, but they're not lying about it:
> DuckDuckGo is part of the affiliate programs of the eCommerce websites Amazon and eBay. When you visit those sites through DuckDuckGo, including when using !bangs, and subsequently make a purchase, we receive a small commission.
> This mechanism operates anonymously and there is no personally identifiable information exchanged between us and Amazon or eBay. These links are regular organic links (like any other link in our results) and these programs do not influence our ranking or relevancy functions in any way. That is, they are not advertising like paid placements or paid inclusions, and we only generate revenue from them if you ultimately find them relevant enough to end up purchasing an item.
As long as they don't alter the search results to give those links an advantage, I have no problem with them using affiliate links. It makes them money to absolutely no loss to me, right?
If for convenience I search for "Amazon product X" on my browser bar instead of directly on Amazon, that means that in order for Amazon to generate a certain amount of profit on that product they also have to pay my search engine now, which means all other things equal, this costs me money.
Of course in real life it's not that simple a situation but it's easy to see that everyone behaving like this ends up with the consumer essentially losing money.
I'm more than fine with this approach (assuming you're made aware of it being an affiliate link), especially when the alternative is giving up my privacy to a glorified advertising company.
Honestly, I've been using ddg daily and I find I'm having to hit !g more than I'd like. Google in particular seems better at finding matches that come related to the ordering of the words, whereas ddg I have to quote them (and risk getting no results because I misremembered one word) when searching for a specific phrase.
My experience is that google gives me results assuming all of the words I searched aren’t the words I’m looking for, and it uses tangentially related words in place of everything. Even quotes are useless now.
Ddg is useless when I’m searching for local things like restaurants and whatnot, but for general searches, it gives me what I’m actually looking for at least 75% of the time. With google, I’m barely hitting 25% these days unless it’s a very well established phrase/concept that I’m searching. In which case, it’s basically functioning as a Wikipedia search engine.
In my experience Google is a lot better if you don’t know what your searching for (the search “movie head box” returns the movie Se7en in Google and some old movie called “Head” on DDG) but infuriating if you do, as it will provide 6 ads, 8 different “answer boxes” and then link to low quality spam sites below that.
In my experience Google is a lot better if you don’t know what your searching for (the search “movie head box” returns the movie Se7en in Google and some old movie called “Head” on DDG) but infuriating if you do, as it will provide 6 ads, 8 different “answer boxes” and then link to low quality spam sites below that.
Same here, I switched to DDG as my default engine at work and find it returns mediocre results for anything tech related and sufficiently niche.
On the plus side, it does work fine for everything else - i.e. the typical searches a normal person might do - so I might switch my personal devices to using it soon.
I find it very interesting that the comments here on HN so far are predominated by discussion of "privacy".
The article is about anti-trust regulation.
These are different things.
Regardless of what you might think about the privacy of any particular option today, the point of this change is to make sure more choice is available and visible to users. In the long run, it's worth remembering that such choice might be a prerequisite for more privacy-oriented services to have a chance to grow. This is the case even if you don't regard any of the current options highly.
Sure, but grep the fine original article for the word "privacy".
It's not present.
HN is discussing HN's tangentially-related feelings more than HN is discussing the article. I'm not surprised, but I'm certainly frustrated: in addition to being navel-gazing, in this situation it's also substantially missing the main reasons this is good: a regulatory agency is actually doing Reasonable Things -- things any privacy advocate should probably be pleased with -- but not just are they doing Reasonable Things, they're them in a relatively subtle, non-prescriptive way that actually keeps the options open for further future improvement. This is great; DDG is an incidental detail.
A few years ago (well probably over 20 by now) an older family member asked for my email address since I was going travelling and they wanted to keep in touch with this new-fangled technology they were about to "sign a contract" for. So I told them - over the landline phone - that it was {my name}@hotmail.com.
I never heard a thing from them for the entire time I was away.
So when I finally got back I paid a visit to show them photographs from my trip (I had a 1.3MB digital camera about the size of a small chicken back then). ANd I noticed a piece of paper stuck to the fridge and on it was written {my name}@hotmale.com
I can only imagine what sort of replies poor old Aunt Shirley received and wonder if she ever carried on any of the conversations!
As a very happy DDG user for many years now, I agree. I'm embarrassed to search things when anyone can see my screen, because I usually get weird comments about it.
I disagree, I think it needs a memorable, friendly-sounding name. I’ve had more luck selling it to people precisely because of the name. People like ducks in bow ties. Heck I like ducks in bow ties.
Two search engines from the EU we’re mentioned upthread. I have already forgotten their names — that’s a problem DDG doesn’t have. Remembering it’s about ducks is easily good enough to find it.
It's also not very well targeted at global reach. I mean, I assume it's a reference to something in some language / locale? Or, is the humor just super absurdist, i.e. they might've called it ShoeShoeEat and it would've been equally "humorous"?
Assuming the first, it simply means they never imagined being used by people other than (I guess) Americans. Which is unfortunate, but forgiveable.
It's also a terrible finger twister on the keyboard. I wish they swapped duck.co and duckduckgo.com so I could search on duck.co and find dev info on the fingertwister.
it would be good to move away from using the search provider name as the verb and just use something more generic like "search it" or "look it up". there are so many acceptable search engines around these days anyway and it the most popular is going to change every decade it will be just annoying to have to learn a different verb each time
I never meet anyone who cared about the name, either they want to know how the results compare to Google, or that they love the little duck in the logo. It's not even technical people who ask about the quality of results.
The issue here is not if the user can choose a search engine, but if the user is forced to choose a search engine before they're allowed to use the phone.
I am on iPhone 11 and my browser is Firefox, my email app is AirMail, my main messaging app is WhatsApp and I get all my directions from Google Maps (planning on switching to an alternative in the near future).
But Firefox (and Chrome) on iOS are using the Safari rendering engine right? Or did that change?
Also, he said ‘default’; Siri etc still opens Safari or iOS Maps instead of Chrome or Google maps even though I never use Safari or Apple maps. You cannot change that or can you?
My take is it's a consequence of their vertical integration. Maybe they saw all along, by not even allowing the option to change, there's no way they could be forced to present a rolodex of possible choices - since there's only one choice that works.
You always had the choice with Android, it just had a default. That didn't smell good to regulators in the EU, and they saw an easy option out of that. Telling Apple to open up their walled garden is a lot harder, compared to Android where the garden's already much more open.
IMO, sad that the better approach is getting hit by the regulation stick. Not that I personally think it's needed in either scenario, but it is frustrating to see Apple skate by.
As a past Android user (still trying the new flagships out at stores every year) I find myself to just not be bothered by many "issues" in iOS proclaimed by Android users.
Default browser not Firefox? Meh... it barely even happens that Safari pops open despite me using FF all the time. It's a complete non-issue for me. Others may find it more annoying but the OS is 10x more fluid and better to use. The only Android I have seen come close is Huawei's which I prefer over stock/vanilla (but would never buy due to China). Samsung/LG etc. are a laggy mess out of factory although Samsung has improved with OneUI 2.
European laws are far more flexible and open to interpretation. At these high levels, the enforcement of the laws is mostly chosen by the will of the people.
Ask 100 Europeans if they think Google is doing something unfair and should be fined, and more will say yes than the same of Apple. Then the regulators just need to find some basis for said fine the people are asking for.
Google makes money off of google search and it's not much of a stretch that they're abusing their market power to strong-arm users of one service of theirs (Android) into using another (search). Meanwhile Apple does not profit from their stock apps -- not directly, at least.
I use ddg as my default on laptop(Firefox) and mobile(safari), on SE Asia region.
The basic search results are quite reasonable. The challenge comes when I need specific information, or second level info. It gets quite hard and I end up hitting a !g on private mode. Partly, stackoverflow helps.
I would say 80-85% it is ddg.
Having said that, I also feel ddg has come a long way than how it was 3-4years back and I’ll continue to use it.
Readit News
Over the years they continue to refuse access for a trusted third-party auditor to review their infrastructure and validate (or not) their claims of privacy.
The preference of Android to place DDG in Europe (31 out of 31 countries) is strange when considering privacy as argument. Then is placed this "info.com" as second option on all European countries (31 out of 31 countries) which is virtually unheard about, and again a US-based service which again raises eyebrows on privacy.
Europe-wide has a search engine that deserves our preference, and that is http://qwant.com
Precisely because it is built and hosted in Europe. Yet, it is displayed as the last option and only as an option for 8 out of 31 european countries. Very strange. Talking from Germany, the preference here would be http://ecosia.com
I will use Qwant in the future but at the minute it's not suitable (IMO) for daily usage.
Ecosia seems like a great idea, but these kind of 'Search and earn' sites have always seemed like a scam to me and I can't find any reason to trust Ecosia over DDG.
This topic with DDG is recurring since years. You cannot verify the infrastructure, it is not hosted on EU-bounded servers and they have been asked for cooperation. Nothing moved as far I follow.
With Ecosia you are right. The point is that Ecosia accountable to European Law in case of scam. You can trust germans to close down the service if ever deemed to be a scam.
Deleted Comment
Which company would accept (and pay for that) given there's no legal requirement for it?
Here's a better test: DDG sets exactly one cookie in my browser, with a short value (not unique enough to track anything). Makes me trust them more than some BS popup saying "we care about your privacy"
I don't see why I wouldn't trust DDG in relation to their alternatives
Maybe relevant for a company whose business model is built around the promise of preserving end-user privacy?
> I don't see why
Data storage and network communication occurring inside the European space alone, rather than sending packets from European users to elsewhere unknown. Being fully accountable to European law, with base offices and employees in Europe so they are subject to the same data-protection rules as other locally-based companies.
When looking at other alternatives such as Ecosia, Qwant: they do offer this and yet are seldom presented as a search engine option by Android. Strange.
This a million times. For the same reasons why I don't trust proprietary (closed source) crypto software.
Which is essentially Bing[1], including the ads[2].
[1]: https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/206153381-Where...
[2]: https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/206019452-How-d...
Why not the opposite? It is easier for the government to seize your data if the service is under their jurisdiction.
Companies that are US-based can be depended upon to leak like a sieve with very little prompting. Given that, the EU option is the smart option. In the EU, there is at least a modicum of accountability and some expectation in the law (in theory but more importantly in practice) that people are respected and left alone.
Ecosia is just repackaged Bing, ostensibly with a second filter/ranking pass over Bing's results iirc. Is there much difference between the two from an end-user perspective, beyond the ecology gimmick?
Qwant is far bigger. Aims to be a complete replacement for Google in Europe with their own datasets. They have difficulties in funding and their survival is mostly depending on public funding and eventually being accepted as default choice for companies across Europe.
From that perspective, it makes a huge difference when more people become aware that independent options exist.
Plenty of pictures and distracting news on the front page.
https://lite.qwant.com
As for Qwant, it says it's based in France but I know nothing about it.
Just from the face of it, it's not clear that these solutions are better (Qwant is a maybe and Ecosia is a definitely not). This ambiguity coupled with their relatively unknown nature could be one reason why the EU did what it has done.
https://m.nextinpact.com/brief/en-septembre-2019--les-result...
Strange thing is that the domain qwant.eu is for sale.
DDG's advantage is much less bloat and almost as good results as Google (in some areas arguably better), while not feeding their personalized ad machine. Qwant is worth trying as well.
Dead Comment
DDG Marketing.
I'm kind of ambivalent about the privacy of DDG vs Bing (maybe I shouldn't be, but since I use DDG anyway, I haven't done the research) - I simply prefer the UI of DDG over Bing.
> I don't like bing search results, especially for Europe. They are just bad for many local things.
I wish Google was less aggressively local. I pretty regularly search for things on Google where I'm looking for the global/most well-known instance, and Google directs me to weird local results that I've never heard of and don't care about.
I moved between countries in the recent years and also changed language in the OS from German to English (seems that is one switch of many) and suddenly many search results changed.
I am not aware that there is a censorship of things that are deemed 'politically incorrect' by either bing or google, and Yandex does comply with European copyright law and other EU legislation like the right-to-be-forgotten.
https://www.google.com/search?q=daily+stormer&oq=daily+storm...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=daily+stormer
DDG provides the link to the site as their first result; Google provides links to information about the site.
Again, I am not endorsing the site; it is simply an obvious example of search result differentiation between DDG and Google.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google
Am a staunch gun-control type, but there certainly has been evidence of google censoring political causes they disagree with. This is not the way forward. It's incredibly hard to have a discussion with someone who clearly has a point about the masses being dictated what they see/think by a Google search. These sort of things do not advance civil discourse and only serve to inflame it in an "us against them" mentality.
But to be fair Google is often better... it depends on the topic you search for.
How?
My understanding is that Bing only provides the index, not the search result
Right now you are grounding on anecdotal evidence which is generally accepted to be a quite weak form of argument.
I am asking out if interest because I am a happy user of ddg and wonder what I am missing out on? Are my needs so different from other users that I don’t have the issue that you are describing at all? Are you sure it’s not just a “this is slightly different so it must be worse” type situation?
For example, the tensorflow terminology for reducing dimensionality is "squeeze" and the scipy Gaussian distributing is called "normal".
A DDG query for "python squeeze normal" shows me stuff about the animal. Google correctly infers that I want programming advice.
I also really don't get why when I search for a TensorFlow function name, DDG will show me random pages with code examples instead of the official manual page for that function, which has my exact search query as meta title and as top h1.
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/numpy-squeeze-in-python/
https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy-1.15.1/reference/generated/...
https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/generated/numpy.s...
https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy-1.13.0/reference/generated/...
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/numpy/numpy_squeeze.htm
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34990652/why-do-we-need-...
https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/squeeze
https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/torch.html
https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.s...
https://www.programcreek.com/python/example/13561/numpy.sque...
Litterally nothing on the first results about the animal.
While DuckDuckGo seems to be enjoying some halo effect in some communities at the moment (Google once enjoyed a similar glow), I think that general skepticism is probably a healthy orientation toward search engines.
You'll notice when you search for an item like "Airpods" the shopping instant answer appears including products from Amazon.
The top right of that placement (https://i.imgur.com/EIpFjVR.png) you'll see it is noted that this is an ad. These links are eligible for affiliate commission as outlined in our help pages (https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/ad...). Even in this situation, no personally identifiable information is shared with Amazon.
Amazon links that appear in the organic results are not affiliated.
eBay links that appear in the organic results may be affiliated. As per our policy, this has no impact on their organic ranking or appearance - and no information is shared with eBay.
We agree that general skepticism is healthy, and try to make clear that any element which has its placement changed, or elevated because of a financial incentive is labelled as an ad.
If there is something unclear about that, we'd always love to hear more user feedback!
> DuckDuckGo is part of the affiliate programs of the eCommerce websites Amazon and eBay. When you visit those sites through DuckDuckGo, including when using !bangs, and subsequently make a purchase, we receive a small commission.
> This mechanism operates anonymously and there is no personally identifiable information exchanged between us and Amazon or eBay. These links are regular organic links (like any other link in our results) and these programs do not influence our ranking or relevancy functions in any way. That is, they are not advertising like paid placements or paid inclusions, and we only generate revenue from them if you ultimately find them relevant enough to end up purchasing an item.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/ad...
Of course in real life it's not that simple a situation but it's easy to see that everyone behaving like this ends up with the consumer essentially losing money.
Ddg is useless when I’m searching for local things like restaurants and whatnot, but for general searches, it gives me what I’m actually looking for at least 75% of the time. With google, I’m barely hitting 25% these days unless it’s a very well established phrase/concept that I’m searching. In which case, it’s basically functioning as a Wikipedia search engine.
On the plus side, it does work fine for everything else - i.e. the typical searches a normal person might do - so I might switch my personal devices to using it soon.
The article is about anti-trust regulation.
These are different things.
Regardless of what you might think about the privacy of any particular option today, the point of this change is to make sure more choice is available and visible to users. In the long run, it's worth remembering that such choice might be a prerequisite for more privacy-oriented services to have a chance to grow. This is the case even if you don't regard any of the current options highly.
It's not present.
HN is discussing HN's tangentially-related feelings more than HN is discussing the article. I'm not surprised, but I'm certainly frustrated: in addition to being navel-gazing, in this situation it's also substantially missing the main reasons this is good: a regulatory agency is actually doing Reasonable Things -- things any privacy advocate should probably be pleased with -- but not just are they doing Reasonable Things, they're them in a relatively subtle, non-prescriptive way that actually keeps the options open for further future improvement. This is great; DDG is an incidental detail.
- Google
- DuckDuckGo
- Yandex
Why would he click the "silly" option besides humor. It's a bad brand name IMO
I never heard a thing from them for the entire time I was away.
So when I finally got back I paid a visit to show them photographs from my trip (I had a 1.3MB digital camera about the size of a small chicken back then). ANd I noticed a piece of paper stuck to the fridge and on it was written {my name}@hotmale.com
I can only imagine what sort of replies poor old Aunt Shirley received and wonder if she ever carried on any of the conversations!
Two search engines from the EU we’re mentioned upthread. I have already forgotten their names — that’s a problem DDG doesn’t have. Remembering it’s about ducks is easily good enough to find it.
Assuming the first, it simply means they never imagined being used by people other than (I guess) Americans. Which is unfortunate, but forgiveable.
It's also a terrible finger twister on the keyboard. I wish they swapped duck.co and duckduckgo.com so I could search on duck.co and find dev info on the fingertwister.
(I assume, anyway.) I happen to remember it from a drama lesson at school in the UK, but I'm pretty sure it's predominantly American, yes.
Deleted Comment
I sometimes say "You should duckduck the info" (or use a single duck) if I have time to explain what I mean.
Though, writing this, I guess people will become familiar with that term too if DDG gains enough traction.
The name simply never comes up as an issue.
Apple does not require that.
I am on iPhone 11 and my browser is Firefox, my email app is AirMail, my main messaging app is WhatsApp and I get all my directions from Google Maps (planning on switching to an alternative in the near future).
Also, he said ‘default’; Siri etc still opens Safari or iOS Maps instead of Chrome or Google maps even though I never use Safari or Apple maps. You cannot change that or can you?
You always had the choice with Android, it just had a default. That didn't smell good to regulators in the EU, and they saw an easy option out of that. Telling Apple to open up their walled garden is a lot harder, compared to Android where the garden's already much more open.
IMO, sad that the better approach is getting hit by the regulation stick. Not that I personally think it's needed in either scenario, but it is frustrating to see Apple skate by.
Default browser not Firefox? Meh... it barely even happens that Safari pops open despite me using FF all the time. It's a complete non-issue for me. Others may find it more annoying but the OS is 10x more fluid and better to use. The only Android I have seen come close is Huawei's which I prefer over stock/vanilla (but would never buy due to China). Samsung/LG etc. are a laggy mess out of factory although Samsung has improved with OneUI 2.
It’s not sad, it just doesn’t make sense. This isn’t logical - Apple should be getting hit worse for being more restrictive
Ask 100 Europeans if they think Google is doing something unfair and should be fined, and more will say yes than the same of Apple. Then the regulators just need to find some basis for said fine the people are asking for.