I'm a bit uncomfortable with how much DDG's marketing is focused on trashing their competition. They deliberately obfuscate privacy issues to strengthen their narrative. Sure duckduckgo is a good company right now, but that's only because they're small. I doubt they'll stay that way when they capture a significant market share.

> when they capture a significant market share.

but they haven't built a better mousetrap, and they're up against the greatest mousetrap ever known to mankind

Eh...Google even 5 years ago was 10x more useful to me than they are now. No exaggeration.

Even Search has become markedly less useful, a common story around here, to the point where even nonbubbled proxied Startpage.com searches are disappointing.

Maps becomes less reliable all the time from a user perspective (in my immediate region, to cover my ass I guess).

Chromecast and YouTube, in general and in conjunction, have become...bloated, buggy, user-tracking-first embarrassments of their original versions...don't get me started on Gmail.... if you're gonna take all my info, at least be good at your services. Especially the ones I pay for.

I remember there was a time when googling was so intelligent it seemed like it was going to become self aware! Dunno what happened along the way but the last few years it’s like a giantfairly sophisticated grep coupled with a bunch of sponsored links.

SEO happened.

All that tells me is that the problem space evolved and Google didn’t keep ahead of it. Same as what happened to Yahoo(!) before them ... my point was that Google was a very intelligent platform and now less so. Perhaps they just decided they could coast on the SEO ...

sometimes I feel that way, but a quick trip to DDG or Bing reminds me that while Google has felt regressive, they are still the kings of showing me what I want up front.

This is balloney. For a regular user google is 10x better than it ever was. Search intent, voice search, user based predictions. Get real. I understand quote searching for lines of code doesnt work like it used to but thats not where google makes money

As mostly a casual user of these products, can you speak to how search and maps have degraded?

Plus they could easily survive for decades fulfilling only the niche market who cares about privacy. They may never need to be the "big fish", which will involve compromising their users security, and therefore lose a lot of their value proposition.

Even having 1-5% of the search market is a pretty great business. Not everyone needs to be Google-scale to be a success.

Does anyone know if there's folks working to build a better mousetrap where search is a protocol that anyone could use, not a company service?

If you are thinking about decentralized search, it already exists in some P2P networks (ex: Kademlia)

However, it is nowhere as effective as commercial services. So much that the most effective way of finding pirate stuff is often to Google them despite all the copyright takedowns.

Why? That's the differentiator they chose to go for. You can argue that's it's dishonest, but i don't see the problem with the marketing.

Personally I find their writing mean... I do not love the super optimistic marketing lingo, but DDG sometimes sounds too vicious in their blog. (I still use them as main search engine, but I am not sure I would like them to go mainstream)

> Sure duckduckgo is a good company right now, but that's only because they're small.

Only because they are small? That seems to imply that if they ever get big, they’ll no doubt become evil, privacy-wise. Apple proves that does not have to be the case.

Apple’s main business is hardware, and software that helps sell the hardware. Any revenue from data is likely a seperate, minor stream; and for it to become a significant one, likely requires significant changes in Apple’s operations. Like any other hardware company, they don’t need google’s kind of data collection to make money.

But DDG is primarily funded by search, and the search business is funded by ads, which are more valuable based on targetting quality, which is improved by... data. About the unique user, specifically. For DDG to grow while maintaining search as it’s primary business, it’s difficult to imagine them not eventually (or at least, being heavily incentivized to) approach/mimic google-style of data collection — because data collection is their money maker.

Apple is unique amongst FAANG in being non-data-reliant, from the start; they never had strong incentives to turn to it, and took the opportunity to stand against it, improving their primary business without any immediate loss (they’re hit by opportunity cost for it, but otherwise).

Apple collects and uses data all the time. Their marketing kind of claims they don't, but their privacy policy is very clear that they do.

For example they continuously collect GPS position + list of WiFi APs from iPhone users to build their crowd-source'd wifi location database: "To provide location-based services on Apple products, Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. Where available, location-based services may use GPS, Bluetooth, and your IP Address, along with crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower locations, and other technologies to determine your devices’ approximate location."

They also state: "We also use personal information to help us create, develop, operate, deliver, and improve our products, services, content and advertising, and for loss prevention and anti-fraud purposes."

It's quite eye opening to compare how Apple's marketing describes their privacy policy vs. how Apple's legal describes it.

I've been seeing comments on HN praising how Apple respects users' privacy etc. Though I have a genuine question: how can we be so confident that Apple follows their claims while their software remain closed-source?

For client-side Google software like Android/Chromium at least we got to fork and remove the evil bits; we have built thriving communities based on that and everyone's got an alternative to Google. In the case of iOS/Safari do we trust Apple-provided binaries solely based on claimed policy / reputation?

Also, Apple sells the default search provider space on their OS to Google for ~9B/year.

So, does it really matter if Apple doesn't directly operate their advertising business and instead outsources it?

This says nothing about apple selling user data like google of facebook.

We should be more clear in distinguishing various levels of attacks to privacy.

Google doesn't sell user data either, though.

But Apple's privacy policy is very clear that they do share user data and they do use personal information for advertisement purposes: "Apple and its affiliates may share this personal information with each other and use it consistent with this Privacy Policy. They may also combine it with other information to provide and improve our products, services, content, and advertising."

Does Apple collect less data than Google? Almost certainly, Google is crazy good at it. But are they still collecting data and using it for targeted advertising? According to their own privacy policy YES, yes they are. Including tracking people on their websites: "Apple’s websites, online services, interactive applications, email messages, and advertisements may use "cookies" and other technologies such as pixel tags and web beacons. These technologies help us better understand user behavior, tell us which parts of our websites people have visited, and facilitate and measure the effectiveness of advertisements and web searches."

Seriously, just read Apple's privacy policy: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/

It really doesn't match their heavy privacy-first marketing push of late.

And for things like Siri it's hard to imagine that they aren't going to get increasingly creepy on the data collection aspect of things. It's sort of necessary to build out a "real" assistant. Asking things like "What time is my flight?", which is a useful feature, requires it to know when your flight is. Which you probably didn't manually tell it, because that's not very assistant-y, but instead it had to crawl your emails to find it. That ends up being creepy data collection. They could do it purely on-device, but then your homepod can't answer the same question, which breaks the magic. Unless they build some way for the homepod to ask all your other Apple devices. But if all your devices form a collective network that can share data about you between each other is it really "purely local" anymore? And what stops Apple from joining in on that mesh network whenever they want?

Perhaps research “Differential Privacy” to better understand what they are actually doing.

You are seemingly suggesting that they do Google-style data collection where data is attached to a specific user. It’s a disingenuous interpretation of their privacy policy (both the marketing version and the legal version.)

https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Differential_Privacy_Over...

What should actually be eye opening is how Apple actually does protect privacy. They should be applauded and not condemned.

What part of handing over keys to iCloud to Chinese govt need to be applauded? The sooner people realize big corportations including Apple, Google will do things to generate profit, the better. Wallstreet, for better or worse, wont be kind if Tim Cook came in and said we decided to forego profit because differential privacy

Apple obeys the laws of the countries is operates in. Are you suggesting they should not?

On your second point, they Tim Cook has already said on their earnings calls that they could have monetized user data if they wanted to and chose not to. In fact they built Apple Maps at huge cost specifically so they would not have to give personal data to Google. They've been very clear about this.

> Apple obeys the laws of the countries is operates in. Are you suggesting they should not?

They can always choose not to operate in those countries. But they do, and accordingly making a conscious decision to endorse those laws in the name of profit.

According to that logic any Western tourist that visits Beijing and goes to Tiananmen Square, as I have, and doesn't wave about pro-democracy banners is 'making a conscious decision to endorse' Chinese censorship laws. So apparently I'm now a Communist shill?

Or are you saying that no foreign companies anywhere should do any business at all in China and no tourists should go there because doing so and obeying the laws is tantamount to taking personal responsibility for them?

By extension, I suppose this means that, by not breaking them, you are personally endorsing every law of the country in which you currently reside, or any countries you have or will ever visit?

1 corporations are not people. Analogies should only be made when there's an actual similarity point.

2 if you're making that point, there's still a difference between action and omission. Nobody would held you accountable if you don't actively try to topple a murderous regime, but if somehow it's laws require to participate in the stoning of a person, well, maybe you should grab a ticket to home instead of a stone, or at least is expected for you to weight the situation, not just shrug and quote: "well, it's the law".

Companies are made up of people, and the people are liable for any laws they violate while conducting the business of the company. Furthermore if companies aren't persons, do they therefore not have any of the obligations or responsibilities of a person, to obey the law, to answer to the courts, to be held to contracts or be the subject of law suits? The argument against corporate personhood is, frankly, utterly incoherent. Clearly they are entities which can have rights and obligations, many of which are similar to and derive from those of the people of which they are composed.

What Apple is doing is more like visiting a country and being told you either have to participate in stoning someone or pay a fine, and they are paying the fine. That's why they won't operate iCloud services in China, which will instead be run by a Chinese company which Apple will have to pay for the service.

Proper analogy is Western tourist coming to China, and filing reports about dissenting Chinese citizens. It's not about waving banners.

Apple built maps, because they couldn’t come to an agreement with google, something about turn by turn. The money exchanged with google probably played a part too

DDG’s “product” is a privacy centric search. Once they get big why would they throw their product away and become like the competition? That simply does not make any sense because the only reason why most people use them is the privacy aspect.

Good on Apple and DDG for realising that privacy has value and using that to grow their product.

Brin and Page pretty much say it's inevitable that a commerical search engine will succumb to "evil". The only solution they present is an academic/non-profit run search engine.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html (scroll down to "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives")

The owners of a commercial search engine say that it's inevitable that a commercial search engine will succumb to evil.

Hmmm.

Not to put too fine a point on it, they once said that - the linked paper from Brin and Page was published in 1998, when they were still students.

Notably, though, just a few months before they launched as a commercial operation.

Reminds me of the Onion article:

https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-na...

Sorry for the offtopic, but Im interested in natural Language constructs like this way of using Hmmm. after a sentence. First I thought it was something from the Portuguese speakers, after more thinking I see maybe it is common of French speakers. Or maybe is common in the U.S. too, I have been there only few times. I found it very funny, and somewhat familiar. :ps: The wonders of having a search engine at anyone's hand.

I think the linguistic term is "interjection". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interjection

So you're not going to apply the "if it's free, you're the product" logic for DDG as well?

Well, the obvious reason is that it may not be possible to get “big” as a search engine, without chipping away at the privacy gaurantees. Even if they get the users, can they sufficiently monetize them without turning into google?

Wouldn't DDG be able to monetize their search engine by simply showing ads relevant to your current search? They don't have to store your search history to do that, and you still get the same privacy.

I don’t disagree that DDG might turn evil. What I disagree with is the premise that they are not evil only because they are small.

Maybe we should start thinking about growth. All kind of bad decisions are taken in the name of growth. Maybe some companies could just provide a service, be profitable and grow just to a natural size not focusing on growth itself. That would require a new way of thinking the role of companies in human society.

This is incompatible with dominant funding models: private VC funding requires that the non-failures get exploited enough to make up for the failures. Publicly traded shares make it impossible to prevent shareholders who think that the company could grow to 10x from buying out those who think that it can or should only grow to x. Employee-owned coops will see their de-facto ruling bureaucrats seek to rule a bigger organisation, because that's the kind of personality who rises into those positions. The only funding model that has a chance to stay "happy-sized" (and where it's even possible that claims like "we care for our customers" are not lies) are owner-run bootstrapped shops and they often enough do stay that way. But for the same reason they hardly ever make it into the news.

Then perhaps we as a society need to engineer more diseconomies of scale.

Apple's Services revenue hit 10 billion per quarter in the last earnings report, and it's growing steadily. Yeah, it doesn't compare to hardware sales, but I don't think it can be called a minor insignificant stream any more, can it?

What does services actually consist of? From [1], it looks like the major components are the app store, iTunes/Music (purchases, I assume) and the iCloud? I'm not seeing the data dependency that would incentivize Apple to look to Google for advice, at least not in this category.

The closest might be recommendation systems, but afaik even Netflix only collects from its own information pools, and the main chunk of it is probably for their custom shows; Amazon definitely doesn't track that much data about their users, because their recommendation system might actually be useful if it did.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Apple_Inc._services

Sure, I am not disagreeing with you. Just pointing out that Apple is making data services work as a revenue stream just fine, without the privacy invasion. Your comment read a little bit like it was implying that Apple's privacy stance is only realistic because they are not making money on services, and if they were making money on services, they would start invading privacy.

Here there is a big difference still, their services are a marketfront. This is a lot different from Youtube for example.

Also keeping an internal profile of registered user is very different from squeezing every cent of advertising out all available user data

Amazon I think tracks whatever it can. Whenever I visit a product, even if I didn't buy it the product (or something similar) will show up as "Continue shopping ...", and not very later as ads on my Facebook feed. It almost creeps me out (I use quite a few filters on uBlock), considering there is no visible facebook "Like" button on Amazon.

Not sure how it works, but whatever I see on Amazon shows up as ads on Facebook.

I believe apple has ridden the hardware train about as far as it goes. There's no money in laptops and desktops anymore. The latest android phones are good enough. The "apple store experience" has become a dystopian nightmare compared to almost any other form of shopping. Constant pressure to increase earnings will inevitably force them to move a larger and larger percentage of their business to data and start striping away privacy features.

A real concern for privacy has only ever existed in the open source world, and google and apple have effectively crushed that threat.

Apple has nearly 1 billion iOS users and 70 million MacOS users. If Apple had invested more heavily in their MacOS ecosystem, rather than letting products like the Mac Pro rot for half a decade, they may have eaten at the marketshare of their competitors.

As is, many of the Mac diehards I know have migrated their kids off the platform in the past year or two, and some have made the leap themselves. Its a sea of change from just a few years ago.

Oh please! Apple may not represent the same privacy clusterfuck that Google does, but that doesn't make them good. They still are absolutely abhorrent with regards to vendor lock-in and planned obsolescence.

So in response to “this company isn’t bad in this particular area” your argument is “Oh please! They may not be bad in that area, but what about all these unrelated areas where they are bad”?

I always hear so much about lock-in with Apple and using their platforms extensively alongside other ones I’m curious as to what examples people are actually thinking of.

My point is that right now, DDG too small to do any real harm to anyone. Their questionable word choice in announcements and blog posts signal to me that they're willing to take shortcuts to achieve their bottom line. If they grow big enough, these shortcuts will start actually hurting people.

Examples?

>Apple proves that does not have to be the case.

Apple was part of the PRISM program.

Apple is a hardware company from the start, their strategy has been fixed long before other Internet companies figured the value of customer data.

Their narrative of being privacy enforcer aids their strategy of building closed systems.

I'm not telling Apple is deceiving its customers with the privacy narrative, but it isn't a guardian of privacy either; if it was it wouldn't have entered CHINA like other comments have pointed out.

That because Apple isn't primarily a Web or services company.

Any company who's business revolves around online ads will be tempted to invade your privacy.

See: http://peakads.org

Still, that doesn’t guarantee they’ll turn evil once (if) they are big, which the parent comment seems to imply with the word “only”.

Make no mistake, Apple is a multi-national megacorp just like Google and Microsoft, and is heavily influenced by shareholder sentiment. When push comes to shove, they will bow to political pressure, as exemplified by Tim Cook's praise for China's conference promoting "cyber-sovereignty" as "a digital economy for openness", and their ceding of China iCloud keys to China servers.

Apple does business in China. So not a good case for privacy.

> Apple proves that does not have to be the case.

By handing over all iCloud data of Chinese users to the Chinese government?

You surely must be jesting!

Oh gosh, a company in China follows Chinese law! The outrage!

Regardless what your view is, are you seriously suggesting companies should break the laws of the countries they operate in?

Before you say: “unjust laws, yes!” Consider what laws Chinese consider unjust, should they be allowed to break them within the US?

I would err on the side of: if you don’t agree with the values of a country then don’t offer your services. Capitalism, of course puts no value on values, so profit is the only ethical code a business should follow (logically).

Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

A company decides to do business in China knowing that it means handing over all data on Chinese users to the Chinese government.

This company is:

1) Apple?

2) Google (project Dragonfly)?

Replace Google with Exxon and privacy with renewable energy, and you'll see why people aren't bothered by this slight against Google. Not all griping is equal. This isn't the same as putting another person down to lift yourself up, or putting another local small business down in order to lift yours up.

I don't pay attention to renewable energy marketing, but I don't think they attack Exxon as much as DDG attacks Google.

I think a closer analogy is health food companies advertising that misrepresents the benefits of organic foods.

I have never seen an organic food commericial. I haven't seen a fruit or vegetable commercial for years.

I have seen products over labelled like the low carb steak or the sugarfree water. These products were always low carb or sugarfree.

DDG attacking google tells us they are shooting for number 2. Attacking google provides free advertising. It also tells us if they get bigger they will double down on being different from google so the chance they will suddenly turn against privacy is unlikely. If it does happen funding is running out.

Yeah, but in this analogy your favorite renewable energy company just announced one of their products is now produced by Chevron. Which is not Exxon and therefore, ostensibly, a huge win for renewables.

You’ve reminded me of Apple’s adverts at the beginning of the 2nd coming - the Mac guy and the PC guy.

When you’re deeply in the underdog position I think that style is ok, but at a certain point it becomes a bit gross.

> Sure duckduckgo is a good company right now, but that's only because they're small

Is this opinion or fact?

As a DDG user I share your same skepticism. But I also believe that privacy will become a premium feature, even a symbol of status - similar to the iPhone/iMessage today. Poor people will buy devices that are subsidized with "targeted advertisements" and Facebook apps they can't uninstall. The premium market will pay to not deal with this nonsense.

> The premium market will pay to not deal with this nonsense.

And thus stand out for targeting purposes regardless.

Targeting works the more data you have. You could target “well off iOS user” but that’s less invasive than “searched topics of adoption and abortion. Recommend local abortion clinics”. Ya see what I’m getting at here?

If you have few enough users on a given platform, they tend to be identifiable by being so unique. If there's one user who logs in from Chrome in Incognito on an iPhone X via a VPN in North Korea, it's not too hard to fingerprint them, if you're looking for it if course...

Like when Google were little and their actual tagline was "Do No Evil".

The tag line was actually « Don’t be evil ». It was never an official motto afaik.

Well, they certainly can't compete on search quality.

“Certainly”? I doubt the deservedness of that certainty.

DDG satisfies most of my searches on the first go, and I’ve never had success with !g after a failed DDG query.

Furthermore, the Google results has a cluttered design with sparse information, so it takes much longer to figure out that I haven’t found what I’m looking for.

I’d say Google is the one failing to compete on search quality. At one point they did, but now Google’s consumer products compete on brand awareness and price, which they can only do because of their conquests in the advertising industry. Most people are not Google’s customer, they are part of Google’s enterprise product: the attention of people whose data profiles meet various requirements.

Yes, certainly. DDG very often have quite okay results while Google has almost always outstanding results. I have to use !g quite often when searching for a programming or architecture solutions that are just slightly more complex than mainstream. I am using DDG mostly because I trust in the cause. OK, I admit that bangs are nice. That being said, both our comments are just an opinions. I'd gladly see a research about their accuracy.

Remember that "Bing it on" campaign Microsoft ran, to show that in a blind test, users couldn't tell the difference between Bing search results and Google search results?

Well, Microsoft's test completely backfired on me. I ran the test many times. In most cases, one of the columns had clearly better results, and 80+% of the time, that column was Google.

Small sample size to be sure, but it covers 100% of the population I care about in choosing a search engine (me).

Granted, this was Bing, not Google, but I kind of doubt DDG would fare better. (And in non-blind tests, I definitely fell I'm getting the worst results from DDG).

In my experience the difference between Google and DDG results is that when Google has desired page as the first result, DDG will have it somewhere on the first page of results. Definitely not as good, but still very much comparable.

And I also pretty much never have to use !g. DDG results are sufficient most of the time, and when they are not, I notice Google usually also fails to provide satisfactory results.

I use ddg as my primary search. I haven’t counted but my gut says I do a second search on google ~40% or more.

I like ddg, i support them, but for any but the most basic queries google is a solid tier above.

True

When Google announced to their advertising customers that they were buying everyone's credit card data, that was my own personal bridge too far.

>Google has been able to track your location using Google Maps for a long time. Since 2014, it has used that information to provide advertisers with information on how often people visit their stores. But store visits aren’t purchases, so, as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607938/google-now-tracks-...

Perhaps other search engines will reach this extreme level of creepy behavior in the future, but Google is there today.

That's a very misleading way of putting it. From your own article:

> In addition, Google does not know what products people bought.

Of course not. Whose credit card statement includes a listing of the individual items you purchased at a store during a particular transaction?

It's not in the statements that you received, it's a reciprocity agreement between retailers and CC companies to share the data by CC #

For example, CC companies could give you your itemized purchase history for Macy's on your statement, if they wanted to.

It is my understanding that most stores do not share that data, because they feel it is a significant commercial advantage.

Credit card companies have wanted itemized transactions for aaages (it's even part of the protocols they use) for fraud prevention, but very few merchants have agreed.

Not for SMBs, but major retailers share the information keyed of CC# as part of reciprocity agreements, including Amazon.

Whether it's true or not doesn't change anything to what the parent comment said.

Yeah, but so is about anything else. Google doesn't share that information, that's a huge principle of their company. Also, DDG is small, so it can be easily exploited.

yeah, but they wouldn't be switching from openstreetmap to apple maps if they cared about privacy.

Well, no?