DuckDuckGo I agree

Software
22

this is not great news for DDG users

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23

Just a heads up…Qwant is a French company.

24

This is pretty disappointing. DDG doesn’t seem to value their core principles as much as they’d like us to believe.

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25

They rely on other companies for the bulk of their search results so some compromises are, IMO, inevitable.

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26

My understanding is that this only affects the DDG browser, not the DDG site…

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27

I don’t know. I find it disgusting. Any alternatives ?

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28

Alternatives to DDG? There are several but the only one I’ve tried is startpage.com.
IMO both will surface the obvious results but come up short when you search for more obscure facts. There’s a reason Google is number one.

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29

Out of curiosity, would you be willing to pay for an alternative? I think that’s the only way an alternative will be viable- a large, paid user base.

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30

I had relied on Startpage for a few months. But Startpage is owned by some data mining company. So it’s really hard to trust them. In addition, Startpage frequently serves captcha or just refuses to search.

So far there’s not that much alternatives. Maybe Kagi as a paid service, eTools, or self-hosted searX instances like https://searx.be/.

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31

Here’s the explanation from DDG’s founder. I hesitate to post the clarification because it’s nuanced and people get angry when a news cycle runs hot, but this is making people think the search engine is affected, and that is bad for adoption of private search engines.

This is not about search. To be clear, when you load our search results, you are completely anonymous, including ads. For ads, we actually worked with Microsoft to make ad clicks privacy protected as well. From our public ads page, “Microsoft Advertising does not associate your ad-click behavior with a user profile.” This page is linked to next to every Microsoft ad that is served on our search engine (duckduckgo.com). https://help.duckduckgo.com/company/ads-by-microsoft-on-duck….

In all our browsing apps (iOS/Android/Mac) we also block third-party cookies, including those from Microsoft-owned properties like LinkedIn and Bing. That is, the privacy thing most people talk about on the web (blocking 3rd party cookies) applies here to MSFT. We also have a lot of other web protections that also apply to MSFT-owned properties as well, e.g., GPC, first-party cookie expiration, fingerprinting protection, referrer header trimming, cookie consent handling, fire button data clearing, etc.

This is just about non-DuckDuckGo and non-Microsoft sites in our browsers, where our search syndication agreement currently prevents us from stopping Microsoft-owned scripts from loading, though we can still apply our browser’s protections post-load (like 3rd party cookie blocking and others mentioned above, and do). We’ve also been tirelessly working behind the scenes to change this limited restriction. I also understand this is confusing because it is a search syndication contract that is preventing us from doing a non-search thing. That’s because our product is a bundle of multiple privacy protections, and this is a distribution requirement imposed on us as part of the search syndication agreement. Our syndication agreement also has broad confidentially provisions and the requirement documents themselves are explicitly marked confidential.
[…]
We specifically worked with Microsoft to make our ads privacy protected. When you load them, they are completely anonymous. When you click on them, we got Microsoft to contractually agree and publicly commit (on [the disclosures page] that "Microsoft Advertising does not associate your ad-click behavior with a user profile. It also does not store or share that information other than for accounting purposes.”

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32

DDG has less than 1% of the search engine market. Bing only has 3%. And paid search is a non-starter.

I’m not going to say private search is impossible. But getting the entire world to drive the speed limit has a better chance of success.

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33

Yes I totally agree. Most people aren’t interested in privacy at all, especially if they have to pay. I was just commenting for people who care about privacy.

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34

I think DDG is great

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35

Only if it were a couple of bucks per month. It would be worth it for the developers.

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36

I’m interested in privacy but keep returning to Google because it works. Today I received a phone call from an unknown number and wondered who it was from.

Bing and DDG returned no relevant results for the number. Google’s first hit was a link to a PDF that told me exactly who it was.

I find DDG’s explanation reasonable. Providing a service for free, which everyone seems to want, will always have at least modest commercial compromises.

37

I, for one, appreciate the clarification. :slight_smile:

And I think this illustrates why paid search is a non-starter. Unless there were millions of people using it, “a couple bucks a month” wouldn’t even begin to touch the infrastructure costs.

When I’m talking about “infrastructure”, I’m talking about the ultimate solution - for them to build their own engine. But I mean…imagine the server load to index the entire Internet well, and then return fast results on demand worldwide. And then the programmers to run / maintain that.

So right now, they need another business / business model that benefits from the building of the engine - or an existing engine they can use.

And that’s effectively what the DDG / Microsoft deal is - another (third-party) business that already has an engine, and benefits from DDG’s search traffic. It’s not creepy in the sense of trackers, but it does show MS ads for DDG searches. And Microsoft’s results come with Microsoft’s rules.

As long as search is free, somebody will be funding it - and the reason they’ll be funding it is because they get a worthwhile ROI on that investment.

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38

What if Google had to cut back on free services. No more free YouTube, Gmail, or Maps?

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there is Orion browser and Kagi Search by the same developer. It is beta but will be paid service

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40

I’m not arguing that Google remains the best, but it also fails on many obscure searches. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Google results heavily favour reviews and 'how-to’s and I find they favour “the obvious” at the expense of “what I actually asked for”. If your search is a sentence, they will simply strip it down to the keywords and give you what everyone else asked for. Or, more likely, what lots of people are saying — which leads to all those sites that republish the same banal content as all the others.

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41

Some good info about the cost of search in the Kagi FAQ:

Apparently 80 queries cost them about $1. So it adds up quick.