DuckDuckGo Is Giving Away $225,000 To Support Open Source Projects (businessinsider.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Google Search competitor DuckDuckGo announced it will be giving away a total of $225,000 to support nine open source projects, each project will receive $25,000. DuckDuckGo said it performed 3 billion searches in 2015. It differs from many other search engines as it offers private, anonymous internet search. It doesn't gather information about you to sell ads to marketeers, like Google. Instead, it shows generic ads as it's part of the Microsoft/Bing/Yahoo ad network. It also has revenue-sharing agreements with certain companies in the Linux Open Source worlds, and makes money from select affiliate links. The $225,000 DuckDuckGo is giving away is chump change compared to the $100 million Google gives away in grants ever year. However, for the select projects, it should still be very beneficial. Last year, DuckDuckGo gave away a total of $125,000 to open source projects, so it's nice to see them donate an extra $100,000 to a good cause.

Comments

But are their search results as good?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bing and Yahoo don't seem to offer the same quality of results so I wonder about Duckie?

Re:But are their search results as good?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not Google, but they've improved tremendously just over the past year. It's probably very close to Bing at this point.

Re:But are their search results as good?

[tgv]

Depends. For generic, English searches, it works. For specialized technical searches or other languages, I still have to go back to Google from time to time.

Re:But are their search results as good?

[Barefoot Monkey]

Duckie should be roughly similar to Bing, since that's where it draws its search results. There might be some differences due to the fact that DuckDuckGo prevents Bing from tracking you, which limits how much the search results can be customised for you.

Give it a try - I hear that it works well (Bing has improved immensely since it first appeared). If you aren't happy with the results and prefer Google's, but still want to avoid being tracked, then try using StartPage. It's an anonymous search engine, like DuckDuckGo, but it uses Google to generate search results, which I find to be better.

Re:But are their search results as good?

[TheRaven64]

I've been using DDG as my primary search engine for a few years. If you stick !google or !bing into the search form, it will redirect you to them for the search, so if I don't find something then I try the other two. It's been at least two years since doing this actually found something useful. Yesterday I had the converse experience of a colleague complaining that something I'd suggested that he read (the Symbian kernel internals book, out of print but now available online) was hard to find - he'd searched using Google, which only had stale references to developer.symbian.com, which no longer exists. I'd found it as the second hit with DDG.

Re:But are their search results as good?

[Dins]

Their image and video search really suck though.

I disagree. I think their image and video searched have improved dramatically over the last year or two to the point where I never use Google anymore for image/video searches. YMMV

I too only end up using Google for something maybe once every couple weeks. Duck Duck Go is the shit...

Re:But are their search results as good?

[Hognoxious]

something I'd suggested that he read (the Symbian kernel internals book, out of print but now available online)

What a coincidence - I used to hang around with archaeologists too.

Re:But are their search results as good?

[fbobraga]

thanks: I used DDG because I didn't know this https://startpage.com/ ^^

Re:But are their search results as good?

[zixxt]

Yes! Startpage and Ixquick are so much better than DDG in terms of privacy and search results, it a shame that somehow DDG got all the attention over them.

Re:But are their search results as good?

[DrVxD]

What a coincidence - I used to hang around with archaeologists too.

I guess that makes me a dinosaur - I used to work at Symbian...

Cynic

[liqu1d]

All the "free" marketting doesn't hurt either.

Money

[Anonymous Coward]

Question is, where are they getting all this money?

Re:Money

[JackAxe]

Without looking into it, the generic adds it shows?

Re: Money

[Anonymous Coward]

they have ads, but i suspect the average user of ddg is more inclined to have an adblocker than the average flock-following user of google or huh-i-can-change-the-default? bing user.

more importantly.. we don't really know who or what ddg is... who backs it, and whether or not they're in bed with various 3 and 4 letter acronyms.

and finally, do we really know ddg founder gabriel weinberg? can we really, truly trust someone who made his millions by collecting and then profiting off personal information of others? (optobox/names database sold to classmates.com in '06)

Re:Money

[Merk42]

Out of thin air like all the ideal paywall-less ad-free sites I expect the internet to be.

Re: Money

[Dins]

Same here. It's one of the only, if not the only site I actually have white listed so I see their ads.

Re:Money

[DrVxD]

Huh? It adds generics?

Only sum of the time

Re: Open sores is for cows

[Anonymous Coward]

OP is kinda like an angry Donald Trump cow poster.

Here's the list of recipients

[Anonymous Coward]

Since it wasn't in the article, here's a list of recipients.

• Freedom of the Press Foundation for SecureDrop
• Freenet Project
• OpenBSD Foundation
• CrypTech Project
• Tor Project for onion services
• Fight for the Future for Save Security
• Open Source Technology Improvement Fund for VeraCrypt
• Riseup Labs for LEAP
• GPGTools for GPGMail

Re:Here's the list of recipients

[TheRaven64]

They do have targeted advertising, but it's targeted at the search term, not at some profile of you. They're the same sorts of ads Google used to show, back when I ever saw ads from Google that were vaguely relevant to something I wanted. They don't record information about you and they work to ensure that things like referrer headers aren't sent to other sites leaking information about your searches. They do use cookies if you modify settings, but the cookies only include your settings (you can inspect them and see that you get the same cookies from the same settings on different machines. Not sure if they still do, but they also used to define what the cookies mean so that you could construct your own if you wanted).

Bite Google

[Cornwallis]

" The $225,000 DuckDuckGo is giving away is chump change compared to the $100 million Google gives away in grants ever year."

Well fuck you too. DuckDuckGo doesn't require you to sell your soul as Google requires.

Re:Bite Google

[invalid_user]

I am with the devil Google. Oooo, so scary. Goooogggllleeeee. I am here to take your soooooul....

Grow up.

Good to see..

[slashrio]

..that they're doing fine.

Still kinda sucks compared to Google

[melted]

But that's expected, since it's basically a nerd friendly front end for Bing.