Comment by yegg
4 years ago
Recently the National Advertising Division looked into our privacy claims and found them supported, see https://bbbprograms.org/media-center/newsroom/duckduckgo-pri... & https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/privacy-protection/12106...
Also a lot of what we do is open source on GitHub. We recently put out a help page detailing or web tracking protections that link to a lot of the relevant repositories: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we...
And finally, I’m not sure that random or just popped up is an accurate characterization for us. We’re pretty well established at this point, having been around for nearly 15 years! I was an early user of this site and a frequent contributor during the early days of DuckDuckGo.
Those aren't proper audits. And again, bringing up the fact that it's open source is a meaningless piece of information since there is no way to verify it's the same software code on production. It only serves to trick the average user who doesn't understand how web servers work into trusting your service more.
The best thing you could do, if you actually care about privacy and not just $$$, is to open-source the entire search index db and accompanying webserver software, making it easy for users to setup their own local instance of DDG which is actually auditable. Additionally, posting a notice on-site which notifies your users that their searches may be recorded and tracked in spite of what the privacy policy says(due to the USA jurisdiction of the company making it susceptible to National Security Letters and secret gag orders) would be the right thing to do.
> open-source the entire search index db and accompanying webserver software, making it easy for users to setup their own local instance of DDG which is actually auditable
Easy to self-host? How large do you suppose the Bing index is, for example? Simply storing the index would be an immense undertaking beyond the reach of probably everyone who has ever self-hosted anything, ever. This ignores the compute required to actually search it, as well as how it would get updated.
I'm not sure your request is remotely reasonable.
I was curious, so as a point of comparison, the latest Common Crawl [0] is 3.1 billion pages and 370 TB uncompressed. I would presume that Bing would be significantly larger given commercial interests.
[0]: https://commoncrawl.org/connect/blog/
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Yet somehow search engines like Google and AskJeeves existed and worked alright 20+ years ago on hardware 1/1000th as powerful as it is today.
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> Those aren't proper audits. And again, bringing up the face that it's open source is a meaningless piece of information since there is no way to verify it's the same software code on production.
> The best thing you could do, if you actually care about privacy and not just $$$, is to open-source the entire search index db and accompanying webserver software, making it easy for users to setup their own local instance of DDG which is truly auditable.
self hosting isn't feasible for 99% of the population. DDG is aiming to be the mainstream privacy protecting search engine, I used them for a while and can appreciate their efforts. if you want something nerdy and and self hosted use a searX instance or host it yourself.
>self hosting isn't feasible for 99% of the population
Its only this way because companies have a vested interest in keeping it like that. It's how they make their money. It is absolutely within the realm of possibility that people host their own search engine. 99% of people know how to install Google Chrome right? this should be no different. The entire search engine & webserver stack it depends on could be bundled into a .exe/.app installer with simple instructions people can understand. Consider XAMPP- which already provides a webserver stack that is extremely easy to install on Windows/Mac just by a simple .exe/.app that 'just works'. This hypothetical search engine could use similar methods as the XAMPP installer. There is no technical reason why this can't happen. It just isn't happening because it'd increase competition, cutting into DDG's profits.
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I stopped trusting ddg when they said they were going to sensor Russian news. I assume google and other major search engines sensor political issues but I didn’t think ddg would.
The very nature of a search engine is to rank information. Everything a search engine does implies some information gets relatively down-sampled.
It was announced in a very political way. It came across as signaling that they were “doing there part.”