Slashdot Mirror
DuckDuckGo - Is Google Playing Fair?
Penurious Penguin writes "Privacy-oriented search-engine and Google-rival DuckDuckGo is contending possible anti-competitiveness on the part of Google. MIT graduate and founder of DuckDuckGo Gabriel Weinberg cites several examples; his company's disadvantages in the Android mobile OS; and browsers, which in Firefox requires only a single step to set DuckDuckGo as the default search — while doing so in Chrome requires five. Weinberg also questions the domain duck.com, which he offered to purchase before it was acquired by Google. His offer was declined and duck.com now directs to Google's homepage.
Weinberg isn't the first to make similar claims; there was scroogle.org, which earlier this year, permanently shut down after repeated compatibility issues with Google's algorithms. Whatever the legitimacy of these claims, there certainly seems a growing market for people interested in privacy and objective searches — avoiding profiled search-results, a.k.a. 'filter bubbles.'"
It's all about numbers, shares, dollars and control of data.
DuckDuckGo can sod off, in my opinion. My one experience with DDG results from their inclusion as the default search engine in Linux Mint. 1) Their search results are crap. 2) Trying to replace them with Google as the default search provider was CRAZY DIFFICULT. I don't want to hear about how hard it is to change default search providers to DDG, because changing back was a non-trivial task for me.
There is a market for a not-Google. Just like there is a market for a not-Facebook. But just like recent U.S. elections proved, being a "not-something" is not necessarily enough to gain market share. You have to be better, or at least perceived as being better. DDG is not, at least not in my experience, and whining in public is certainly not helping.
cej102937
What seems more likely:
1) He offered to buy duck.com from On2 Technologies (which was originally named The Duck Corporation), but they held out for more than he was willing to offer. It's an obviously valuable domain name so this doesn't require some kind of secret agreement with Google: maybe they just thought they could get more than he was offering for it.
2) Sometime later, Google bought On2 for their codec (VP8, on which WebM was based). Of course this means they got all their other assets too, like their old domain name. Typical Google practice is to redirect acquired domain names to google.com, or to a specific product page on google.com if relevant. Considering that Google is very interested in codecs, it seems rather unlikely that Google really bought On2 for the domain name.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
They didn't specifically purchase duck.com, though. They bought On2 Technologies, formerly known as The Duck Corporation, in order to acquire the VP8 codec, which became WebM, and got all the rest of On2's assets as part of the package. It seems unlikely that the real point of the purchase was to acquire duck.com, considering that VP8 is actually pretty important to them.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
As the article states, duck.com was acquired when Google purchased On2 Technologies, previously known as The Duck Corporation. Duck made video codecs for Sega Saturn games, among others. On2 was finally acquired by Google for their VP8 video codec, which became part of the WebM video standard. No conspiracy here.
Since July 2, 1890. You shouldn't ask rhetorical questions that have actual answers.
Well it could be true that there's a growing market, and you'll definitely find people on Slashdot who are part of that market, but could we have some stats? Why does it "certainly" seem that the market is growing?
Anecdotal evidence: Privacy search plugins like Google Sharing appear to have fast growing userbase/# of reviews etc, many more each time I upgrade and check them anyway.
Some time back in Britain, a bank marketing genius decided that the way to get new customers was to get rid of the old charging model and offer "free" banking. It was such a brilliant wheeze that all the other banks had to follow suit. However, in order to make a profit, banks were then obliged to slap on a whole new range of exceptional and penal charges in the small print and to give their customers the hard sell for a bunch of other financial products that they didn't need (and for which the banks are now paying billions of pounds in compensation). Everyone is agreed that "free" banking is broken, but nobody can be the first to reinstate charges because their customers will all take a hike.
Search engines are the same. Having "free" search engines is a really crazy idea if you think the end user should have some interest in how the results should be selected and presented. But nobody is ever going to pay to use a search engine while the other(s) is/are still free, even if the results are worse.
So we're stuck with a model in which the selection and presentation of results must of commercial necessity be orchestrated for profit and the more people who see those results the more profit is made.
You can argue about the extent to which the orchestration is fair and transparent - and indeed whether fairness and transparency are adequate counterweights - but as long as someone else is paying the conductor you get no say in the performance.
That... would be better if were spelled out explicitly in the article or at least implicitly in the summary.
But where would be the fun? Gone...
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Except that when you realize DuckDuckGo is actually Bing in disguise, it regains the social stigma of using a Microsoft product. So you're back at square one.
I think you'll find that in this case, it's not interfering in businesses, and this is just more ant-Google FUD. There is an extraordinary amount of it around lately.
I think Google is being pretty nice here. If they really wanted to be anti-competitive they would try to stop sites from displaying Google search results within their own site and trying to pass themselves off as some kind of alternative to Google. Really Google could be doing a lot worse based on how entrenched they are in internet culture. Although, maybe they are so entrenched because they make it so easy for other site developers to use the data and tools that they've put so much hard work into.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Right-click the search entry field, select "Create search", enter keyword in the pop-up, Done.
(check the checkboxes in the pop-up if you want to make default (else it just add it into your list))
To search a word, just select it and right click, it offers to search both the default or select from your entire list.
Yet another reason why Opera is awesome :D
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
Lazy writing is to blame here.
I'm sure the article authors were not just being lazy, but in fact knew all this perfectly well; and made a decision not to mention it since it contradicted the opinion they were trying to promote.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
It's not just Bing. They take results from a long list of engines, including their own crawler.
Duck.com was not specifically purchased to be anticompetetive. It was owned previously by On2, who used to be known as The Duck Corporation. Google purchased On2 for its V8 video codec to create WebM.
Unless someone is seriously going to stipulate the creation and push towards WebM was a deep seeded plot to mess with DuckDuckGo, this theory has no leg to stand on.
These sites are using Google's (and Bing's and others') results, collating them and presenting them to the users. Why exactly do they expect Google would play fair with that? It's not like Google specifically provides a service for third parties to reuse their search results. They're setting up an additional, unsupported layer between users and Google, and thus shouldn't be surprised that said layer requires frequent changes to work. Google won't stop and ask "we want to change this, that fine by you?" when they see no profit, no advantage from it.
Because "Google" is so much better? "Yahoo!" was a great name? Get the fuck over yourself. Friggin prima donna
If you'd read the link inside post, you'd see that the citations were already there, and Google and DDG are both represented by quotes.
They're not lazy at all. Instead, the post was used to craft a reactive opinion based on only a few facts inside the referenced link so as to provoke a response. This is called: suckerbait, and many took it.
Should search engine choice be the same number of clicks? Perhaps. But what the article alludes to is that a preponderance of facts *appears* that Google is engaged in anti-competitive behavior. Whether that behavior is monopolistic or sufficiently injures the public so as to motivate FTC litigation is still unknown.
Is DDG crying empty tears? I think they have some legitimate beefs with Google. I believe that Google is anti-competitive, but I don't know whether they're sufficiently anti-competitive so as to necessitate action to control that behavior. A good fight is a good fight until someone's fighting "dirty".
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I started working at The Duck Corporation (duck.com) in 1996, a few years before it went public as On2 Technologies/The Duck Corporation (on2.com and duck.com), and was working with Google/Duck/On2 until a year and a few months after the acquisition in 2010. At Duck/On2, I was responsibile for everything related to building our networks and maintaining all the hardware, software, servers, domains, networks and a ton of other stuff, you know the typical system administrator job.
Prior to the acquisition, but after going public as On2, we likely didn't sell duck.com because that was still my primary email address and I and a few others still actively used it, and we still kept up a basic website for information about our old and basically no longer supported software; and it was just one of those things still tied to the company with a lot of history as The Duck Corporation, so we decided to keep it. Feel free to blame me, since I always requested that we keep it when we saw the many offers for the domain over the years, mostly in the hundreds to couple of thousand dollar range; and because of my history with the company, I am sure I was a big part of that decision to not sell it.
When Google bought us, I knew I was still going to be there for a while to make sure all our company data, and some specific services that had to stay up, was migrated into their servers. Since we hosted all our own servers with our own hardware and software and they had to ulimately be shut down, I had to get things moved over and still needed to get my duck.com email.
So at that point, since I was still getting a lot of duck.com emails and had my duck.com email address for literally many hundreds of websites, publications, mailing lists, business contacts and other things, since I mainly used duck.com for well over a decade, I wanted to make sure Google's DNS and email was configured to still get duck.com emails. I actually had started trying to switch all my duck.com to google.com, but it was an overwhelming process. I still wonder how much email is still going to my duck.com email address.
I took it upon myself to learn the Google way of configuring their public DNS, email and a bunch of other things because I was nosey and wanted to learn and did learn some really cool and interesting stuff about them while I was there. I made sure the MX record for duck.com was still configured to deliver my email (and a few other email addresses) to my Google email account. Since it was decided to no longer keep the website up, I can't give you a real explanation, but I ended up configuring duck.com websites to point to the google.com main page instead of nothing. So you can go ahead and blame me, but no one at Google specifically told me to point duck.com to their site.
Interestingly, that is fairly similar to the relationship between Bing and Google, as Bing uses "many methods" but part of that is cribbing off of Google results. Just Google "Bing using Google results". Or Bing it :)
How did the parent get modded up? DDG uses Google. It is meant for private searching. It has the option of using Bing.
FTC is already investigating Google for anti-competitive practice, but not on this front.
They are more concerned about organic results being squeezed out in favor of Google properties. Instead of being redirected to natural results, half the first page results are taken up by ads and Google shopping properties. FTC is not keen on this, and they will supposedly sue if they don't get an acceptable agreement in place.
witold.org