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DuckDuckGo Denies Using Fingerprinting To Track Its Users (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: Responding to a forum post that accused it of 'fingerprinting users', privacy-centric search engine DuckDuckGo says that fears are unfounded and that it is not tracking its users. The allegation was made after the Firefox extension CanvasBlocker showed a warning to users. The suggestion of fingerprinting -- gathering as much information as possible about a user through their browser to create a unique identifier that can be used for tracking -- is clearly something that would seem to sit in opposition to what DuckDuckGo claims to stand for. The company CEO says the accusation is simply wrong.
So, one guy on posts on a forum a certain API is being blocked by his Firefox extension CanvasBlocker. Not that the one individual has anything showing some tracking and data gathering, he just sees an API being used. Without any real evidence what so ever. Sounds like someone wants to sow seeds of mistrust at DuckDuckGo.
Because of the aforementioned not-tracking stuff? And the results are as good as Google.
In my experience they are not. Not even close. I wish I could ditch Google, but DuckDuckGo cannot (yet) fill Google's search shoes.
Use "!g " in the DDG search box to initiate a google search with those terms.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Support Duckduckgo.com. I've been using it for years and have seen the amount of spam in my inbox and even social media go WAY down. We need more services like Duckduckgo.com, not fewer.
But, perhaps the inevitable attack on them is showing some success. I'm hopeful.
They still index torrent sites while google keeps shuffling them further down the listings.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
My experience is the exact opposite. I've been using DuckDuckGo since I moved away from AltaVista, and it has always provided me with the results I desire.
This is just one example, but search Google for "how many stars in the solar system" and the first handful of results are not related, and the quick-answer is absolutely wrong.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+many+...
Search DuckDuckGo for the same and you'll get the right answer in the first result.
https://lmddgtfy.net/?q=how%20...
As a bonus, my custom captcha uses these horrible results from Google to weed out bots (and ignorant users I'd rather not have to deal with).
Google search has become useless for me (search tech related issues) - too many sponsored ads and content farms.
Duck Duck go doesn't have all the advertising, and I am getting useful results when searching for issues.
The difference is that while some other services show ads based on interests inferred from your previous viewing history, DuckDuckGo shows ads based only on the context of your search query. DuckDuckGo also adds its referral tag to Amazon product URLs in search results.
(Source: "How Does DuckDuckGo Make Money? DuckDuckGo Business Model Explained")
If you use !sp instead, you can use Startpage, which anonymizes Google search results.
huh? Googles boolean qualifiers havent worked in literally years
"His name was James Damore."
Duckduckgo doesn't do their own web indexing. They purchase web indexing from many sources. Most of Duckduckgo's results are actually purchased through Bing, some is from Google. Many smaller search engines purchase and offer search results from larger entities. The fact that Google, Bing, or anyone else is selling them raw data doesn't mean that Duckduckgo is collecting information for them. None of what you are searching for makes it to Google or Bing that way.
A bang, of which "!g" is just one (!w for wikipedia, !r is reddit, etc) is something different. It's just a quick way of getting results directly from somewhere else - a way that you can have Duckduckgo as your home page but get quick results from other places directly. Of course, when you use one and are redirected, you have no guarantees what the target site is doing with that search data. But if you are coming up dry with the results from Duckduckgo, then !g is one way to try the query to see what Google makes of it.
My personal assessment of Duckduckgo is this. I use it directly for about 95% of my search, and for normal to moderately difficult queries, it works great. For more advanced searches, searches where there might be less signal and more noise (searches with key words that are common jargon but in the context of the search it's not the jargon I'm looking for), then I do find that Google is slightly superior at parsing the search and returning what I want to see. At times like that, when getting the result is more important to me than watching my privacy, then I'll use a !g and try Google if I come up dry on Duckduckgo. Though I find that Duckduckgo is getting better, and there have even been cases where I've gone directly to Google with something I didn't expect would work well on DDG and where I came up dry there and where DDG found me what I wanted.
not lately to me: I migrated from google to exclusively DDG about a year ago
A browser needs to know it to render properly. A website serving it certainly doesn't. And I have no idea why it would.
Why would it? And why would a website? Why would Slashdot? Or (choose a news site)? Or Reddit?
Certainly not. Unlike timezone where a webapp might need to know it, knowing time isn't something that should be communicated client-to-server ever.
This is the only time you actually suggested a use case for the data you're collecting. That said, why does it need to get reported back to the server. The whole point you're making is that the site can display it on its own. So, again, it wouldn't be usable for fingerprinting if it stayed clientside
Again, NOT an exhaustive list. I can keep going.
Instead of just listing features, you should explain what benefit I get out of letting that data leak out of my browser. Cause I don't see it.
Whoa. First, I would think 2002 would be far enough back. Second, the cool stuff that happened since then are things like embedded video/audio. Or CSS advances. I'm not sure what cool stuff's been enabled by new tech since then, rather than faster pipes and the smartphone form-factor.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
>"In my experience they are not. Not even close. I wish I could ditch Google"
You can. Just use:
https://startpage.com/
and get the same Google results but without the tracking.
That's not the right syntax for Google, hasn't been for years. The syntax is now that double quotes mean the search term must appear on the page for it to be included in the results. So double quotes are like a logical AND, everything else is logical OR but obviously heavily weighted.
You correct search term should be:
"ibanez" "rb-800"
First result looks correct but I don't know much about guitars.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC