Comments on: Get A Better Search Experience With Duck Duck Go

By: Danny Stieben

Danny Stieben — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:19:00 +0000

Donations to the cause of privacy-focused searches? That’s my number one possible reason.

By: Danny Stieben

Danny Stieben — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:18:00 +0000

Great explanation, Andrei. There’s always a way around those measures, it seems.

By: Danny Stieben

Danny Stieben — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:16:00 +0000

Google sure is making it hard to not use one of their services while on the web, aren’t they?

By: Danny Stieben

Danny Stieben — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:15:00 +0000

Sounds like a nice project, looking for services that donate to causes if you use them.

By: Danny Stieben

Danny Stieben — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:14:00 +0000

Thanks for the tip, Cell Travis!

By: Michel

Michel — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 15:43:00 +0000

Yes, Google offers great products free, and yes, the internet is always a public space. But for me, supporting a giant corporation which is effectively the largest pirate on the net, is inconceivable. I’m an author, a signatory to the suit against google, and I encourage everyone who values fair play to boycott Google. It doesn’t make life more difficult to change your default search engine.

By: Scutterman

Scutterman — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 15:01:00 +0000

In all things in life, I follow the money. If you can’t see where the money is, then you can’t trust it. Cynical, I know, but it’s served me well so far.

All I can see is a single ad on each search result page, and without tracking users they can’t target the ads.

So, unless I’m missing something, where’s the money? How do they keep going?

By: Greg

Greg — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 00:06:00 +0000

Couldn’t agree more!

By: Andrei

Andrei — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 19:55:00 +0000

Danny, maybe it would have been worth to insist more on the trade-off between privacy and features here.

1. In order to apply the setting DDG needs (obviously) to create a cookie as soon as you customise the settings. They give you no warning when they do so, though the whole process is clearly explained on their website.

2. They claim that the cookie does not create a unique code. It is however true (statistically speaking) that some combinations of setting will be extremely rare. If there are a lot of possible settings (and DDG has a lot) it will almost work as a unique code.

3. the above can do little harm if no part of the IP is stored. We have their promise they do not do so. However, as they clearly state, servers tend to save this data by design. They have turned it off, but there is little way of knowing how hard would it be for a rogue employee to turn it back on.

4. as an exception to 3, it would be quite easy to create a unique cookie to replace the DDG cookie using some malware code to generate an extremely improbable combination of features.

This is not meant to diminish the efforts of DDG. It should be still possible to customise DDG with just a few URL parameters and enjoy privacy and customization at the same time. But the cookie model is by itself unsecure. I feel that DDG should be more clear about this is they feel they are in the privacy business. The only way to have privacy with cookies is… to delete them regularly.

By: Espen Meidell

Espen Meidell — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 19:28:00 +0000

I like Duck Duck Go, in my experience you usually get more relevant hits than you do with Google.

By: Nomad63

Nomad63 — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 19:19:00 +0000

Oh the humanity… I was surprised to launch firefox under Linux mint and without even looking at the default search engine selection (this is firefox after all, what else can it be other than google was the thinking I had) I hit ctrl-k and typed few keywords. Voila, the most irrelevant search results came back, likes of bing or god forbid Yahoo!. Needless to say, I will have to change the default search engine one of these days but I am not using that machine enough to pay more attention to it.
Yes, privacy is a good thing but whan I a searching for a technical article or a how-to, I don’t care if google is tracking me. Without their help, my name is plastered all over the web in a certain subject matter. Why would I care ? Oh yes if you are going to search bomb-making, you might use a web search engine who is “supposedly” not tracking you, but at the same time, don’t let it explode while you are building it, using questionable instruction set from an inferior search engine.
Let’s get over it already. By using web, you have given up your privacy card, no matter what you do. Why make life more difficult ? After all, you have to trust somebody. Living all your life in paranoia and under the tin foil, is not the way to live in my opinion. If I am going to trust one web entity, I’d like it to be Google over Facebooks and linked ins and Micro$ofts.

By: Kyes731

Kyes731 — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 19:04:00 +0000

I’ve been using Ecosia lately. ”Ecosia is a green search engine that donates 80% of its revenue to the protection of the rain forest”. To date they have donated 752,311.96 (as of 2:00 PM EST 12/26/2011) They have a learn more link on their home page. While lean and clean is nice, if I can do any small part to help the environment – such as my Striiv pedometer that makes donations to several causes based on my distance walked – I’m more than happy to assist.

By: Jj

Jj — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 17:50:00 +0000

softwares when they comeout, are swift, clean and friendly.. But ovrrtime, producers become greedy and start to add things and remove.

By: Cell Travis

Cell Travis — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 17:30:00 +0000

I’ve been using Duck Duck Go for about a year now, alongside the Big G. Other than Duck Duck Go, another search engine worth a try is Helioid. For privacy, I prefer to use SRWare Iron with Iron-Start as the default search engine.