Comment by bla3
4 years ago
DDG is for-profit and serves for the most part Bing results. Why not pick something truly open, like search.marginalia.nu?
4 years ago
DDG is for-profit and serves for the most part Bing results. Why not pick something truly open, like search.marginalia.nu?
Flattering.
Unfortunately my search engine is far away, both in terms of functionality and hardware capacity from being able to deal with that. Maybe some day, who knows, but not yet. Even if I'm destined to make the Linux of search engines, we're metaphorically living in 1992 or so.
Would be funny though because it's both developed on a Debian workstation and hosted on a Debian server.
Hey, totally unrelated, but the way your status page is set up made me think your site was down for months (I had started to assume permanently) - when it last went down for maintenance I got redirected to https://status.marginalia.nu/?query=... which said, and still says, "Site down for maintenance" across the top.
Oh, that's a bit unfortunate. I've redesigned that page a bit.
After DDG decided they would censor material they considered misinformation from Russia I went out search engine shopping and I'm using brave search. I value transparency and fairness and can make my own mind about things (I remember when being against the Iraq or Lybia wars made you a terrorist sympsthizer).
Do you have any stance there? (I'm not saying you should have one or agree with mine, just curious. Every search engine might have its time and place).
In general I'm not a big fan of censorship. I think it's ultimately counterproductive. It sends the message that the "truth" needs to be protected from independent scrutiny, effectively undermining the credibility of the institutions, while enabling crackpots to develop a persecution narrative.
That said I do block some sites, mostly nazi stuff if it's designed in such a way that it crops up in regular searches. It's a fairly small number of sites though.
4 replies →
By its very definition, a search engine promotes results it deems relevant, and downranks (or 'censors') results it deems irrelevant.
Probably because one doesn’t exist? That particular example isn’t a general purpose search engine.
A Debian (or FSF, or ...) hosted SearX instance would indeed be interesting and perhaps most Free.
risiOS hosts a searx instance for its users and configures it as the default search engine.
I worry about the sustainability of such a service though. Don’t they inevitably get blocked upstream?
It might work better for more local organizations to host such projects. I’ve always liked the idea of community centers and churches and whatnot hosting shared services for their community.
/e/OS does too. https://spot.ecloud.global
I think you're confusing for-profit, opensource and, as I assume would be the motive behind this switch, at least relatively privacy protecting?
> DDG is for-profit and serves for the most part Bing results
What’s the problem? What matters is that my searches aren’t recorded and added to a profile.
Because the results from search.marginalia.nu are absolutely irrelevant?
It would also crash marginalia I think. Which would be sad.
What would we have Debian change the default search to? I get that DuckDuckGo might not be ideal, but it is better than Google, Bing, Yahoo or Marginalia. The results need to be good enough, but also not obviously anti-privacy. It basically leave you with DuckDuckGo, Qwants or Ecosia. Personally I might had picked Ecosia, had they not had a cookie banner.
Part of the problem is that Google was designed when PCs booted from spinning rust and a fast CPU was a Pentium II.
We (at DuckDuckGo) actually have no current relationship (or commercial deal) with Debian. They did this on their own. That is, there is no revenue share here.
Also, we no longer use the Amazon affiliate program, or Yahoo for that matter, and we don't (and never have had) any idea what any individual bought.
Oh wow, so the deal is actually 0% revshare. And I thought I was a weak negotiator... :D
Well congrats then.
Why are you spouting off accusations without any evidence? This blind cynicism makes HN a worse place.
They know the types of items you buy. You don’t get the exact items from Amazon. They can guess if you click a link to an iPhone and then later bought a $1,200 electronic but if you click on an iPhone and buy a PS5 they don’t know what you bought.
That’s not exactly true - as an Amazon affiliate you do see the exact items purchased under each of your specific tracking IDs, as well as the price it was purchased for, category and device group it was purchased using (desktop, tablet, mobile). This also includes any purchases the user makes in a 24 hour session of browsing after clicking your referral link to Amazon.
I’m unsure how many tracking IDs you can create in your account, and as far as I’m aware and can tell, you cannot pass specific UTM codes or other identifying information along with a click to Amazon that is passed back to you on the reporting side. Meaning, you could track users you send to Amazon, and where you’re sending them, and you can see outcomes, but Amazon only provides the tracking ID back to you as a reference (this ID is meant to be used on a site/channel wide level, but as I mentioned above could possibly be abused depending on how many you can create)
Is that really the case here? I really doubt it considering how careful debian is when it comes to privacy. Even the popularity contest is opt in.
> I hope Debian negotiated better
Do you have any evidence that Debian negotiated a deal? Debian is not a company.
that lwn.net article is from 10 years ago...is it still accurate?