All the code to find like terms and phrases and whatnot is great and not privacy threatening, but I wish the search giants would stop trying to guess my motivations and just present me with the most relevant results based on what I asked for, and not what it thinks I was probably asking for.

The point is that the personalization is somewhat useful, and relying on others input to improve search isn't necessarily going to improve things for a particular user.

I'm a fairly prolific. poster and use DDG search heavily. Be the SERP you want to see in the world?

The same as to why drugs or so many other things are tuned towards men (large body of research and easy to grab for tests) vs women (less historical interest, tricky to research, especially anything that can affect the reproductive functions)

If you do not want Apple/Google/Amazon/whatever listening to you, do not use their services/products.

If you use it to track subsonic audio watermarks to detect what advertisements I see on my TV or find out what products and services I'm interested in, screw off.

Every engineer who pushes code to synergize advertisement business with their consumer audio product business should be ashamed of themselves. It's unethical and should be illegal.

I want the products I buy to do what I think they do. Not hide tracking used to improve other products from the business that I don't pay for.

On-device learning is a thing.

Indeed. I am increasingly suspecting that the next swing of the pendulum back towards thick clients will be driven not by reliability or performance but by privacy and security.

I would still gladly pay for iCloud storage if it was mirrored on local storage. Seems ridiculous they got out of the WiFi router market; missed opportunity for this "edge computing".

Someone let Tim Apple know there’s still time!

Edit: Not to mention, I hate searching for something on a whim and then having ads served to me for the next few months as if that one random search query is a defining feature of me.

For example, just now, I came across "ED survivor". No idea what "ED" means here (it's eating disorder).

I just put it into DDG and got nothing on the first page that looked like it could be pertinent: A user name "ED survivor" on Instagram posting about vegetarianism, Ed Stafford on Wikipedia, "ED: The Survivor" (a mod for a computer game evidently), Devil Survivor Full HD (a film obviously, no idea what ED means here), a few more in this vein, until the page ends with the TV series Survivor on Wikipedia.

Google: First hit "Template:ED survivor" in Wikipedia (and that page contains the words "eating disorder". Second hit "Eating Disorder Survivors Wall", third hit "Surviving ED" from HealthyPlace (so it's health-related – and the snippet shown on the result page starts with "Eating Disorders recovery is a long road.).

The rest of the results on Google are all similar, all of them(!) clearly tell me what ED means in this context.

DDG gave me crap, none of the results(!) came even close to answering my question.

This is not a singular occurence, just a thing I wanted to know a few minutes ago. I'd love to take DDG's search results, but when not narrowed down to specific origins with bang commands, the results are usually worthless.

Edit: and before people tell me that I should have used quotation marks around my search terms, great, let's try that: Two results with "We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.". From the top three results, one times out, one redirects to a sports betting site, and one to a product in an online apothecary (nothing to do with eating disorder). Then penis extension. Erectile dysfunction, something general about mental disorder, and again two results about penis enlargement.

I agree that DDG might not be as useful for finding out what ED survivor might actually mean, but Google didn't list too many options, either, it sounds like. If you hadn't been wanting to know the most popular definition but a more obscure one, Google would have not been useful at all. This is something I run into a lot. Some popular uses for terms means I have to add extraneous search terms just to get around them.

But "ED survivor" is with very high probability not about that mod or erectile problems.

Not to speak of obvious spam sites, like DDG presented.

> No idea what "ED" means here

If you don't know what ED means, that doesn't help you.

But more importantly, the search term was "ED survivor". If you enter the solution, I'm not surprised the solution comes out again.

EDIT: And as a response to the other comment pointing our that you didn't know what ED was in the first place, Google is not the be all end all of knowledge... type "ED !w" and figure it out based on the listing in Wikipedia. This is an inconvenience that I don't mind, that's my entire point.

Theirs, and mine, and matches many other Google users. And thinking the opposite is somehow not your... opinion? FWIW, the world uses Google at large, so a theory that says DDG is not much worse than Google requires stronger evidence than the opposite.

I would have loved to be able to use DDG/StartPage, but having frequently tried alternative search engines, I keep coming back to Google, unfortunately.

For me one of the most consistent flaws is that DDG simply doesn't index some forums that Google does.

At least that is fixed, but as I said, I could swear it happened with another term recently.

Several results that do not contain the phrase "margin-break"

No way. Google is not a philanthropy club, neither Amazon nor Apple. They do it to serve THEIR own interests, which might coincide with yours, but not necessarily so. If you want examples, think of Google's tech support, or how Google and Facebook sell your personal information to third parties.

That said, I use mostly DDG and am satisfied with it. It's a tradeoff.

Sure you can, as long as you control the system. There is nothing preventing us from realizing the old dream of having AIs dedicated to working for us, the users, not some corporation.

It just so happens that the the current favorite business model of big tech is serving us ads, but does this business model serve us? I don't think so.

The ad business model guarantees that our interests are misaligned. I don't want to depend on intelligent agents that want to sell me things, and I don't think anyone with half a brain would either. The more intelligent they are, the more one should fear being manipulated and spied upon if one those not control them.

Wait, what??

That's it? On or Off? What if it is "good enough" right now for some people?

People will turn off the server-side logging because an article told them to, then they’ll complain that Siri sucks, and the service won’t get better.

Therefore, I recommend that people who don’t want to help improve the services through the logging process simply turn it off altogether. That is the safest way to make sure their utterances are not going someplace they are not comfortable with.

However, if you turn it off and then ask people for their data during specific time periods, (EG can I log your voice commands for the next 24 hours?) then people are aware of what you're doing, there is a limited period where they're giving up their privacy, and it's based on informed consent.

What these companies are actually doing is highly unethical from a scientific perspective. They're using people to train their models without even informing the experimental subjects that their data is being collected. There's no debrief for the subjects so they can understand what was learned.