Dev.SN ♥ developers
Sections
Dev.SN
Papas Fritas writes:
"There's an interesting read today by John Paul Titlow at FastCoLabs about DuckDuckGo, a search engine launched in 2008 that is now doing 4 million search queries per day and growing 200-500% annually. DuckDuckGo's secret weapon is hardcore privacy. When you do a search from DuckDuckGo's website or one of its mobile apps, it doesn't know who you are. There are no user accounts. Your IP address isn't logged by default. The site doesn't use search cookies to keep track of what you do over time or where else you go online.
'If you look at the logs of people's search sessions, they're the most personal thing on the Internet,' says founder Gabriel Weinberg. 'Unlike Facebook, where you choose what to post, with search you're typing in medical and financial problems and all sorts of other things. You're not thinking about the privacy implications of your search history.' DuckDuckGo's no-holds-barred approach to privacy gives the search engine a unique selling point as Google gobbles up more private user data. 'It was extreme at the time,' says Weinberg. 'And it still may be considered extreme by some people, but I think it's becoming less extreme nowadays. In the last year, it's become obvious why people don't want to be tracked.'"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by allsorts46 on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:35PM
In case anyone knows any interesting references I can read...
How do we know that they really do (or don't do) what they say they do (or don't)?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:39PM
Read their code. It's open source.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:42PM
Devil's advocate: how do you know that it's what they're running?
(Score: 5, Funny) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:50PM
You hack into their servers and check? ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by animal on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:57PM
It may be open source, but are they running that code?
Somehow they do make money. Maintaining something like that doesn't come cheap.
I'd feel much better if they were more transparent and letting us know how they operate, how they pay the bills etc.
Google is snooping all around our computers, but at least they admit it.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Fluffeh on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:05PM
Taken from Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
Seems pretty straightforward in terms of how they make their money...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:48PM
I can't see anything in that quote where the money comes from. You know, many people using your service for free doesn't magically make you money.
It says they have a small number of contractors. Do those contractors pay them? And if so, what do they get in return?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Fluffeh on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:59PM
The Wikipedia article states that the revenue is from advertising.
If you perform a search on the site, you will see simple sponsored links at the top of the results. No adwords, no sneaky embedded "paid" search results, just a result in a yellow/orange highlight with the words "Sponsored Link" at the bottom right.
Enough visitors and that's a simple way to make money covering costs.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Friday February 21 2014, @01:37AM
There was an article with the founder. DDG makes money by displaying targeted ads. They use the search query to do the targeting. He explained that knowing the search query is 95% of the equation. Obviously, they'll know that because the user typed it in. So they make money the same way google does, by serving ads, except instead of trying to compile a dossier on you like google, they take the straight forward approach of assuming that if you are searching for something, you are interested in it.
Now, how can you tell if their servers are running their software? You can't. But what advantage is there to not? If they get busted one time, their business is dead forever and all the work that went into it evaporates. I do have some faith in enlightened self-interest.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @03:13AM
That's all true but all it takes is one "National Security Letter" or similar.
I don't really care that much about the NSA et all spying on my searches. To me the real problem is that Google's searches have gone down in quality. It seems like I have to switch to "verbatim" mode for almost everything (or I get "joe sixpack" results without the search terms I'm looking for) but switching to "verbatim" sometimes seems to not rank the pages as usefully.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Caballo Negro on Friday February 21 2014, @04:12AM
They also ask you politely to whitelist their site if they spot you using an ad blocker. I've complied.
(Score: 1) by mister_playboy on Friday February 21 2014, @07:45AM
Indeed... that is the one and only whitelisting I've ever made in ABP after having used it for about 6 years!
(Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday February 21 2014, @04:55AM
They do a few other things too. For example, if you type !amazon in your search terms, then you get the result of your search on the Amazon site, but via the referrer link. This means that they get some percentage of anything you buy. I usually just type things I'm looking to buy into the search box and then add !amazon if I don't find it in a quick search of the web.
Those commands are really useful. The !freebsd tag will search FreeBSD man pages, !devapple will search the Apple developer database, and so on. I find it really useful to have a single search box that can redirect me to all of the site-specific searches that I use easily. Most of the ones I use don't provide referrer kick-backs, but some do, and I'm very happy for DDG to get the money.
I switched to using them around 2008 when Google decided to hijack the up and down arrow keys in the search box. On OS X, up-arrow in any text field means jump to the start, and having to relearn muscle memory for a single Google text box was a UI decision that killed the utility of the site for me. At the time, DDG also did the infinite-scrolling thing (no other search engines did, although they all added it soon after) and had a much cleaner UI. I exchanged a few emails with Gabriel over usability issues that were present and he set up a test site for me to complain about and then fixed all of the issues and rolled out that version on the main site. Amazing service and not something I'd see from any of the big search companies (and I know quite a few people who work at Google and Yahoo! personally...).
I still find their zero-click information very useful. Gabriel has actually been very clever there, avoiding the need for complex natural language processing by making it easy for users to explicitly disambiguate what they really mean.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1) by hubie on Friday February 21 2014, @11:25AM
Of course, that isn't always the case [youtube.com]. :)
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday February 21 2014, @11:44AM
The best part of that video:
Mr. Internet on a Segway towing a trailer of cats.
(Score: 1) by hubie on Friday February 21 2014, @12:23PM
With his latte and bluetooth earpiece. :)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Angry Jesus on Thursday February 20 2014, @08:47PM
No it doesn't ... at least not what you quoted. It just says they are "non-ambitious" - but what does that really mean? Apparently he does have VC money and as a group they tend to take "ambition" to the deepest depths of evil.
(Score: 4, Informative) by FatPhil on Thursday February 20 2014, @09:06PM
> May 2012, the search engine was attracting 1.5 million searches a day
And now, 4m s/d.
? exp(log(4/1.5)*(12/21))
1.75
So there's 75% growth per year, not 200-500%
> 45,000,000 per month in October 2012
So 1.5m s/d
So between May and October 2012 there was 0% growth, not 200-500%
These figures do not add up (or multiply, divide, log, or exp).
I did sums at university, dammit!!?!?!? (which my mum still says, without the dammit)
Making a public pledge to no longer contribute to slashdot
(Score: 5, Informative) by Geotti on Friday February 21 2014, @12:41AM
No it's not: [duck.co]
You can do a lot with the open parts, though.
Get started here [duck.co] and here [github.com]. If you do, be sure to sign up for the mailing list [listbox.com] and/or join #duckduckgo on freenode.
There's a VM image [github.com] to get you started and a vagrantfile [github.com] for those who prefer that (no dockerfiles [that I know of], though).
Happy duckduckhacking!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Professr on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:42PM
More importantly, how do we know there isn't a nice little NSA box sitting in front of their open-source code?
(Score: 5, Funny) by snick on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:46PM
Get serious.
Of course there is a nice little NSA box sitting in front of their open-source code
Where do you think you are? America?
(Score: -1) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @02:38AM
Traceroute shows me about thirty of them. Probably thirty one.
(Score: 2) by h on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:00PM
Can we really trust them if they're situated in the USA? Can't the NSA just pull whatever they want from them?
Pardon my ignorance on the matter, I've not really kept up with all the Snowden Cypherpunk NSA battles etc
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jcd on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:09PM
Honestly, you can't really trust a packet that goes anywhere near the US. But at least DDG is a step in the right direction - away from the corporate overlords that want to hoover up every little detail about you to sell you MOAR STUFF.
"What good's an honest soldier if he can be ordered to behave like a terrorist?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @11:29AM
Then where can you trust your packets to go? Is it NSA == bad guys, everyone else == good guys? You're not one of those "USA is the Great Evil" guys and work that into all your comments are you? That pretty much ran me off of the other site and I shudder to think that cancer will be picked up here so soon, but your +5 mod suggests otherwise.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Angry Jesus on Thursday February 20 2014, @08:41PM
Can't the NSA just pull whatever they want from them?
One of the benefits of not keeping records is that you never have to do the work ($$) of complying a subpoena (or national security letter) to hand over any records. That doesn't stop the NSA from recording all the traffic in and out of their site, but it does make retroactive fishing expeditions much harder. And if you are lucky the encryption on the traffic is enough to make it too expensive to decrypt in bulk making it useless for fishing expeditions too.
(Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday February 21 2014, @04:58AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 5, Informative) by Angry Jesus on Friday February 21 2014, @07:51AM
One of the suspected methods of NSA interception is factory-compromised SSL front-ends that covertly expose their internal keys through not-so-random choices of various packet headers. That makes most high-traffic SSL sites potential targets of passive sniffing.
(Score: 4, Funny) by darinbob on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:44PM
It's simple. Just search for bomb making supplies, then time how long it is until you get a knock on the door.