DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public(spreadprivacy.com)
spreadprivacy.com
DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public
https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-for-mac-open-beta/
97 comments
It’s a better way to say it. For you and me it might be better to say “WebKit renderer”. But for a non programmer, calling out the parts they wrote themselves is more reassuring, and highlights all the ways other browsers have to spy on you.
This was indeed hard to describe. When people say they "use Webkit", people seem to take away some kind of direct incorporation of Webkit code. That's not the case here in that we haven't forked anything.
So can you describe in a little detail on what exactly are you doing? I'm not sure if you have plans to open source the browser or not?
Yes, we plan to open source as we come out of beta. It's similar to our iOS app/browser, which is already open source here: https://github.com/duckduckgo/ios
For all practical purposes, yes.
Technically, the article links to the WKWebView class. So it sounds like they aren’t directly using WebKit, but rather WebView, a cross-platform API that delegates rendering to the OS preferred rendering engine, which on Apple devices happens to be WebKit.
Technically, the article links to the WKWebView class. So it sounds like they aren’t directly using WebKit, but rather WebView, a cross-platform API that delegates rendering to the OS preferred rendering engine, which on Apple devices happens to be WebKit.
> they aren’t directly using WebKit, but rather WebView, a cross-platform API that delegates rendering to the OS preferred rendering engine, which on Apple devices happens to be WebKit.
WKWebView is a part of the WebKit API, so it always uses WebKit. As far as I know it's also a Cocoa API, so it's only cross-platform in the sense that it's available on both iOS and macOS.
WKWebView is a part of the WebKit API, so it always uses WebKit. As far as I know it's also a Cocoa API, so it's only cross-platform in the sense that it's available on both iOS and macOS.
I wonder why they went with WebKit? It is nice to see another WebKit browser and not just a Blink/Chromium spinoff. Still it is a surprising choice, even if there's really only WebKit and Blink available for wannabe browser makers.
Because it is a standard Apple API so less work to do.
True, but I as expecting them to want to port the browser to other platforms. Well, you can use webkit on those as well, so maybe it's less work, I don't know.
WebKit is technically cross-platform, but browsers that use it only exist in Linux and Mac world. If DDG ports their browser to Windows and doesn't switch to Blink, then it will be the only well-maintained WebKit browser for Windows.
WebKit is vastly superior to Blink on Mac.
Other comments seem to say it's based on Webkit, but why not something like Mozilla Firefox? I stay as far away as I can from Chrome and Google, but Webkit doesn't seem like the answer. That being said, I may still try it.
A very long time ago, Mozilla decided it was too difficult to keep Firefox’s engine API stable and said it’s more important that we have developer velocity than we have other people releasing software based on our rendering engine.
A decade or so later they kinda backtracked on that stance with boot to gecko and FirefoxOS but it is my understanding that they never took that momentum to make gecko into something that can be used for electron like platforms or indeed a new browser.
Bottom line is that WebKit/blink gives you better website compatibility (because major parts of the web is only tested against chrome) and is easier to use as a library than trying to wrap something around Gecko.
I think this has been one of Mozilla’s worst decisions.
A decade or so later they kinda backtracked on that stance with boot to gecko and FirefoxOS but it is my understanding that they never took that momentum to make gecko into something that can be used for electron like platforms or indeed a new browser.
Bottom line is that WebKit/blink gives you better website compatibility (because major parts of the web is only tested against chrome) and is easier to use as a library than trying to wrap something around Gecko.
I think this has been one of Mozilla’s worst decisions.
The "The Browser" episode from the Acquired podcast might shed some light on the reasons why. If one of the key figures in the development of Mozilla and JavaScript didn't choose it for his own new browser, why would anyone else? :(
The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave) https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/the-browser-with-brendan-ei...
The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave) https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/the-browser-with-brendan-ei...
As mentioned in that interview, Brave's biggest reason for switching away from Gecko was that they couldn't support Netflix DRM. Gecko-based browsers can support it today because Widevine works (see Librewolf).
It's worth noting that Brendan Eich is far from the most impartial party you could hear criticize Firefox. He used to be the CEO, and resigned after Mozilla employees discovered his political contributions.
Sure, one could argue that. But note that even Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, the co-founder of Opera (who even built their own independent browser engine), also chose Chromium to build the new Vivaldi browser. Everyone avoids Firefox codebase because it is a mess (on purpose, so that others can't build a competing browser with it). As for Brendan Eich, I honestly believe that someone wanted him removed to weaken Firefox's growth and development, and they successfully used "cancel culture" to do so. After all, what does one's political beliefs have to do with one's technical and management skills (especially when they are able to compartmentalise and separate it from their professional life)?
You're wrong, as usual: The L.A. Times reported my Prop 8 support in 2012, Mozilla employees found out then, yet I did not resign then or for two years.
It seems you are also implying I'm lying about why Brave switched from Gecko to Chromium because of your animus toward me over something completely unrelated in the past. That says nothing at all about me or Brave, and too much (none good, IMO) about you.
You're one of three or four handles, along with rare green ones, that just can't stop talking (detraction, lying) about me, even when you're wrong and off target by any sane standard. Just recently, HN commenters noted how upside down threads involving my name tend to become, because of you and a very few others. I suggest it's time to stop.
It seems you are also implying I'm lying about why Brave switched from Gecko to Chromium because of your animus toward me over something completely unrelated in the past. That says nothing at all about me or Brave, and too much (none good, IMO) about you.
You're one of three or four handles, along with rare green ones, that just can't stop talking (detraction, lying) about me, even when you're wrong and off target by any sane standard. Just recently, HN commenters noted how upside down threads involving my name tend to become, because of you and a very few others. I suggest it's time to stop.
This looks great! But I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out the bitwarden integration: I already have a bitwarden account (in fact, I run my own self-hosted server), and I can't figure out how to use it in this browser.
Is it just that the password autofill feature uses bitwarden under the hood, but you can't actually use a bitwarden account? If so, that should be mentioned/documented somewhere.
Is it just that the password autofill feature uses bitwarden under the hood, but you can't actually use a bitwarden account? If so, that should be mentioned/documented somewhere.
It isn't yet released.
> But we understand some folks want to continue using third-party password management across browsers and devices. So, we’ve teamed up with Bitwarden, the accessible open-source password manager, in the first of what we hope to be several similar integrations. In the coming weeks, Bitwarden users will be able to activate this seamless two-way integration in their browser settings.
> But we understand some folks want to continue using third-party password management across browsers and devices. So, we’ve teamed up with Bitwarden, the accessible open-source password manager, in the first of what we hope to be several similar integrations. In the coming weeks, Bitwarden users will be able to activate this seamless two-way integration in their browser settings.
Glad to see the DDG Browser on the Mac!
Some brief considerations regarding the UI, after some testing:
– It would be nice to be able to set the initial zoom level to pages or, at least, to remember the previous zoom level. I have to do it every time I open the same website.
– While any website is working on something (loading, for example), there's no indication of that. I ended up closing a tab by mistake while a process on the website was still active. This is something that Chrome does well, adding a loading icon to the tab.
– The text on the main search bar jumps abruptly from the center to the left when clicked. In Safari, there's a smooth animation there, which feels more natural.
– The contrast between the search field and its surroundings is very low. Again, in Safari, there's a fine line that helps with it.
Some brief considerations regarding the UI, after some testing:
– It would be nice to be able to set the initial zoom level to pages or, at least, to remember the previous zoom level. I have to do it every time I open the same website.
– While any website is working on something (loading, for example), there's no indication of that. I ended up closing a tab by mistake while a process on the website was still active. This is something that Chrome does well, adding a loading icon to the tab.
– The text on the main search bar jumps abruptly from the center to the left when clicked. In Safari, there's a smooth animation there, which feels more natural.
– The contrast between the search field and its surroundings is very low. Again, in Safari, there's a fine line that helps with it.
Everytime you use an app instead of a web app you have to trust the author of the app not to permanently track you.
Use web apps wherevery you can and delete the cookies and web storage whenever it makes sense.
Use web apps wherevery you can and delete the cookies and web storage whenever it makes sense.
All apps should have a PWA[0] option. Crpytee[1] is the only service I know of that offers strictly a PWA. PWAs have less privileges and this is good.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_app
[1] https://crypt.ee/download
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_app
[1] https://crypt.ee/download
How does that work for a web browser?
Luckily we have open source web browsers. Most apps aren't.
For those who know a lot more than I do, how does this compare to Brave?
It's not that great. Brave is ahead when it comes to privacy and features and does a lot of things differently.
Also the fact that their contract requires them to whitelist Microsoft trackers is something to be wary of.
https://brave.com/privacy-features/
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...
Also the fact that their contract requires them to whitelist Microsoft trackers is something to be wary of.
https://brave.com/privacy-features/
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...
It's a browser with a bunch of privacy features, just like Brave but with a more opinionated design and subtle differences. It caters to people who don't want to configure a thousand things before they use their browser, which is the only unique selling point of this that I'm aware of.
> Webkit-based browser [...]just like Brave
Brave for Mac is not Webkit-based. It is Blink and V8.
Brave for Mac is not Webkit-based. It is Blink and V8.
Blink is a fork of the WebCore component of WebKit, and aside from sandboxing, has remained relatively similar to WebCore. As such, Brave necessarily is based on WebKit via transitve relation. V8 is a JavaScipt engine, not a browser rendering engine.
Practically, there are only two rendering engines left, 1) WebKit (itself derived from KHTML) and its derivatives such as Blink, and 2) Gecko and its derivatives such as Goanna, (though I guess somewhere someone must be using Flow, which apparently is not based on either, but it is proprietary, thus it will have no derivatives or be used by any other browser other than Flow).
Practically, there are only two rendering engines left, 1) WebKit (itself derived from KHTML) and its derivatives such as Blink, and 2) Gecko and its derivatives such as Goanna, (though I guess somewhere someone must be using Flow, which apparently is not based on either, but it is proprietary, thus it will have no derivatives or be used by any other browser other than Flow).
Blink is similar to WebKit like WebKit is similar to KHTML. In other words, the relation is only relevant for the purposes of historical curiosity.
Thanks for pointing that out. I was mis-reading some of the comments here saying the DDG browser in question is Webkit (because it's a MacOS browser only, for now). So is it based off Chromium as the base then?
(I know Brave is Chromium based)
(I know Brave is Chromium based)
No, you read right. The DDG browser for Mac is WebKit. Specifically it's using the WKWebView Class from the WebKit Framework[0]
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/wkwebview
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/wkwebview
DDG isn't doing uBO level ad blocking like Brave does. It's just blocking common tracking domains and elements, so you don't get (much) cosmetic filtering and some ads will still show up. My local newspaper's site has grey boxes where the ads would be without content or DNS blocking. On YouTube, it can't block the ads unless you open in the "Duck Player" (a page where it embeds the video). It also doesn't support extensions.
That said, it has a cleaner interface than Brave, and it has that fire button from DDG Mobile that deletes everything except for cookies on sites you "fireproof". It's a really nice compromise between "save everything until you delete everything" and "incognito mode" that I wish other browsers would adopt. Plus it uses WebKit so theoretically it should be fast and battery efficient like Safari.
In my opinion there isn't much reason to use DDG Browser unless you really like the fire button. If you want a WebKit browser, Safari with the AdGuard extension blocks ads and trackers, has extensions including more password manager options, and has its own email relay feature. Otherwise Firefox and Brave are excellent and cross-platform.
That said, it has a cleaner interface than Brave, and it has that fire button from DDG Mobile that deletes everything except for cookies on sites you "fireproof". It's a really nice compromise between "save everything until you delete everything" and "incognito mode" that I wish other browsers would adopt. Plus it uses WebKit so theoretically it should be fast and battery efficient like Safari.
In my opinion there isn't much reason to use DDG Browser unless you really like the fire button. If you want a WebKit browser, Safari with the AdGuard extension blocks ads and trackers, has extensions including more password manager options, and has its own email relay feature. Otherwise Firefox and Brave are excellent and cross-platform.
It seems to be designed as a standalone "incognito" only browser. You can except certain sites from being routinely cleared from memory (fireproofing as they call it).
Doesn't really have other features or support for extensions from what I've seen.
Doesn't really have other features or support for extensions from what I've seen.
[deleted]
Too bad they don't show in the User Agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Would love to show the amount of visitors in Simple Analytics dashboards. [1]
Does anybody know a way to detect the DuckDuckGo browser?
[1] https://www.simpleanalyics.com
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Would love to show the amount of visitors in Simple Analytics dashboards. [1]
Does anybody know a way to detect the DuckDuckGo browser?
[1] https://www.simpleanalyics.com
> Does anybody know a way to detect the DuckDuckGo browser?
Only in the DDG iOS app the useragent adds a DuckDuckGo string appended to a generic Safari string. You can test here:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=what+is+my+useragent&ia=answer
Only in the DDG iOS app the useragent adds a DuckDuckGo string appended to a generic Safari string. You can test here:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=what+is+my+useragent&ia=answer
Brave does something similar. It just looks like a generic version of chrome
It didn't always have a generic Chrome UA, if you go here[0] it had 'Brave' somewhere in the string, which you could fix by turning on fingerprinting prevention. Glad they fixed that. I don't want people to know I use Brave, although I'm sure there's ways to detect Brave with JS.
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=what+is+my+useragent&ia=answer
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=what+is+my+useragent&ia=answer
You can do `await navigator.brave.isBrave()` to detect Brave.
[1] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/24478
[1] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/24478
They seem to set something on `window.navigator._duckduckgoloader_`
If you run `JSON.stringify(window.navigator)`, it only shows the _duckduckgoloader_ variable. Anybody knows why JSON.stringify behaves like that?
If you run `JSON.stringify(window.navigator)`, it only shows the _duckduckgoloader_ variable. Anybody knows why JSON.stringify behaves like that?
JSON.stringify is outputting the "own, enumerable" properties. The default properties of window.navigator aren't enumerable and/or come through the prototype chain.
The rules for JSON.stringify are actually pretty complicated: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
The rules for JSON.stringify are actually pretty complicated: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
Thanks for sharing!
Do they still allow Microsoft trackers?
So will uBlock Origin be "crippled" in this browser, like in Chrome/Chromium and Safari?
Does uBlock Origin even exist for Safari? If not, then I imagine it won't exist for this browser either, since it's just a wrapper around a macOS-provided, Safari-/WebKit-based webview.
Looks like the answer is no, Safari is not supported.
> ..as of 2022, uBlock Origin’s extension is available for several of the most widely used browsers, including: Chrome, Chromium, Edge, Opera, Firefox and all Safari releases prior to 13.
https://ublockorigin.com/
Explanation of the state of uBlock Origin (and other blockers) for Safari - https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158
Apparently, the only WebKit-based browser that can run uBO is Orion browser (beta, Mac only).
https://browser.kagi.com/
> ..as of 2022, uBlock Origin’s extension is available for several of the most widely used browsers, including: Chrome, Chromium, Edge, Opera, Firefox and all Safari releases prior to 13.
https://ublockorigin.com/
Explanation of the state of uBlock Origin (and other blockers) for Safari - https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158
Apparently, the only WebKit-based browser that can run uBO is Orion browser (beta, Mac only).
https://browser.kagi.com/
Orion is another WebKit browser that makes WebExtensions installable via its own extensions API. It's not perfect but it's miles better than anything Safari has and allows for existing Firefox/Chrome extensions to be installed. It only supports MV2 and won't be affected by the MV3 changes in Chrome world.
If DDG wanted to they could replicate this work to allow for MV2 WebExtensions to be installed.
If DDG wanted to they could replicate this work to allow for MV2 WebExtensions to be installed.
It does exist in Orion, which is also WebKit...: https://browser.kagi.com/
It used to, but the developer pulled it after extensions were moved to the App Store (requiring an Apple dev account and certification) and some other technical restrictions introduced in Safari 14 IIRC.
Is there a way to block Javascript? I couldn't find it on a quick tour through the preferences.
What is this, a browser? Why do I need a new browser?
Here's a tl;dr for you on "why do I need a new browser" from the post:
* Better web tracking protections: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we.... This includes a bunch of protections not offered by most other browsers and extensions by default (e.g., embedded facebook content protection), or more robust versions of them (e.g., our HTTPS everywhere list is orders of magnitude bigger). More generally our web tracking protections are based on our open source crawler vs. community feedback, and we believe this approach is ultimately better and leads us to study and block new tracking techniques faster.
* New feature: Duck Player, a YouTube player that helps protect your privacy (no targeted ads, no influencing your recommendations, etc.)
* New feature: automatic cookie consent pop-up manager, which not only hides these but also makes sure to select the most private options before doing so (if you don't do that you can be subject to more tracking).
* New feature: Fire Button, one click data clearing for tabs, windows, sites, or everything.
* Our Email Protection integrated natively: https://spreadprivacy.com/protect-your-inbox-with-duckduckgo....
* A focus on Privacy, simplified, which means working continuously on not breaking websites while still protecting you as much as we can, and keeping the interface clean and sleek.
* Better web tracking protections: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we.... This includes a bunch of protections not offered by most other browsers and extensions by default (e.g., embedded facebook content protection), or more robust versions of them (e.g., our HTTPS everywhere list is orders of magnitude bigger). More generally our web tracking protections are based on our open source crawler vs. community feedback, and we believe this approach is ultimately better and leads us to study and block new tracking techniques faster.
* New feature: Duck Player, a YouTube player that helps protect your privacy (no targeted ads, no influencing your recommendations, etc.)
* New feature: automatic cookie consent pop-up manager, which not only hides these but also makes sure to select the most private options before doing so (if you don't do that you can be subject to more tracking).
* New feature: Fire Button, one click data clearing for tabs, windows, sites, or everything.
* Our Email Protection integrated natively: https://spreadprivacy.com/protect-your-inbox-with-duckduckgo....
* A focus on Privacy, simplified, which means working continuously on not breaking websites while still protecting you as much as we can, and keeping the interface clean and sleek.
Duck Player
Duck player seems interesting to me. I use firefox containers to browse youtube and one of my pet peeves with safari is not being able to keep my google and youtube cookies separately.
Duck player seems interesting to me. I use firefox containers to browse youtube and one of my pet peeves with safari is not being able to keep my google and youtube cookies separately.
As a geek, I pride myself in using all the browsers. I have the free time to try them out and each one has its own unique selling point and feature set, which I leverage. Firefox and Brave for privacy. Microsoft Edge for normie stuff. Chrome for using Google services. Tor Browser Bundle for dodging the NSA. Opera & Vivaldi, because they're super customizable and quirky. Then various apps on my phone like Vanadium, Brave, DuckDuckGo, vanilla Safari, Firefox Focus, etc
Why try anything new? Why not just keep using Netscape Navigator or IE6, or whatever works on a Commodore 64.
When do we get the Extensions feature?
I like the flame animation when clearing the browser history. Is that Lottie based animation?
Will this eat more battery than Chrome does?
Rough guess: no. It's based on WebKit so it should perform more similarly to Safari than Chrome.
I used to be a fan of DuckDuckGo. I mained it as my search engine for a long while because it was better for privacy, and it gave me my choice. Then, they decided that they were the arbiters of truth, and they'd start censoring "Russian disinformation campaigns." Because apparently that's important to them. The fact that they also get most of their results from Bing also subtracts points. I also eventually realized that I was still giving a company all of my search queries, and companies are eventually too greedy to trust. It's only a matter of time before DDG becomes the next Google, after hype for Google dies, and everyone knows DDG as that upcoming cool kid.
Now, I just spend $6/month on a DigitalOcean droplet and run a SearxNG instance on it. Until I can get it moved over to my physical server at home, that's a much better option for my privacy and freedom of access to information. Who needs Google, or Bing, or DDG, or Yahoo, etc.; when you can have all of them in a single search?
If you run your own instance, it's better to share that instance with friends or family so they can dilute your search queries with theirs, and it makes it much harder for your instance to be tracked the same as they'd track you. Or, you can use a public instance which is better for privacy, but worse for security and customizability.
Now, I just spend $6/month on a DigitalOcean droplet and run a SearxNG instance on it. Until I can get it moved over to my physical server at home, that's a much better option for my privacy and freedom of access to information. Who needs Google, or Bing, or DDG, or Yahoo, etc.; when you can have all of them in a single search?
If you run your own instance, it's better to share that instance with friends or family so they can dilute your search queries with theirs, and it makes it much harder for your instance to be tracked the same as they'd track you. Or, you can use a public instance which is better for privacy, but worse for security and customizability.
(I'm the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo.)
It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but I subsequently put out a clarification tweet[1] and then we made this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...
[1] "We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are also not assessing any individual news stories." https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515637392190935041
It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but I subsequently put out a clarification tweet[1] and then we made this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...
[1] "We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are also not assessing any individual news stories." https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515637392190935041
It must be so satisfying to wake up on the morning of a product announcement after a long development cycle, pour a nice hot cup of coffee, and then type `news.ycombinator.com` into the browser's address bar
What you have basically done here is say "we only downrank spam" (this is fine), and then said "state-sponsored news is inherently spam" (this is not).
You are using a definition of "spam" that is not commonly held or understood by those who would be your users. Whether or not this is for a noble reason, this renders it a dark pattern. This is not only a violation of the principle of least astonishment, your explanation comes off as deceptive. You are making a value judgment on truth and working that into the product while claiming you are not making a value judgment.
Relevance and truth are two different things. It is not your job to be making calls on the second one, and I find your willful conflation of these concepts, and attempts to deflect from the fact that you have done so to be a bit gross.
You are using a definition of "spam" that is not commonly held or understood by those who would be your users. Whether or not this is for a noble reason, this renders it a dark pattern. This is not only a violation of the principle of least astonishment, your explanation comes off as deceptive. You are making a value judgment on truth and working that into the product while claiming you are not making a value judgment.
Relevance and truth are two different things. It is not your job to be making calls on the second one, and I find your willful conflation of these concepts, and attempts to deflect from the fact that you have done so to be a bit gross.
> we rely on multiple non-governmental and non-political organizations that specialize in objectively assessing journalistic standards.
This is a vaguely worded workaround for applying censorship, especially without giving a specific list of organizations that they consult. The use of the term "objective" is very sneaky here, even manipulative. I didn't realize DuckDuckGo did this - how disappointing.
Time to start trying other search engines, perhaps a proxied or self-hosted one like SearXNG as GP suggested.
https://docs.searxng.org/
This is a vaguely worded workaround for applying censorship, especially without giving a specific list of organizations that they consult. The use of the term "objective" is very sneaky here, even manipulative. I didn't realize DuckDuckGo did this - how disappointing.
Time to start trying other search engines, perhaps a proxied or self-hosted one like SearXNG as GP suggested.
https://docs.searxng.org/
> then said "state-sponsored news is inherently spam
So BBC is spam according to them?
So BBC is spam according to them?
> censoring stories due to operating with very limited press freedom, and misleading readers about who owns, funds, and authors stories for the site
So does this mean you're going to deprioritize The Hill for firing Katie Halper because she wanted to do a story calling the Israel/Palestine regime apartheid?
Or the Washington Post owned by Bezos who is paid untold fortunes by the US intelligence apparatus, and whose reporter listed her news agency as "Amazon" on a sign in sheet to interview Assange?
Do you consider RT (a huge Russian news network) misleading about who "owns, funds, and authors its stories"?
I'm sorry, but I don't think you "accidentally made a bad tweet" -- you tried to publicly jump on the Ukraine bandwagon for cheap political points, it backfired, and you've been backpedaling ever since.
So does this mean you're going to deprioritize The Hill for firing Katie Halper because she wanted to do a story calling the Israel/Palestine regime apartheid?
Or the Washington Post owned by Bezos who is paid untold fortunes by the US intelligence apparatus, and whose reporter listed her news agency as "Amazon" on a sign in sheet to interview Assange?
Do you consider RT (a huge Russian news network) misleading about who "owns, funds, and authors its stories"?
I'm sorry, but I don't think you "accidentally made a bad tweet" -- you tried to publicly jump on the Ukraine bandwagon for cheap political points, it backfired, and you've been backpedaling ever since.
No, as it says on that referenced help page: "Many sites may occasionally do one or more of these things, but we take action very rarely, only in the most extreme cases...We trust that users can find the right information for themselves, so even in these rare cases we do not remove these sites from our search results page. Additionally, impacted sites are not moved so far down in the results that they are effectively removed. Unless legally prohibited, you should find all media outlets in our results, and they should generally show on top if you search for them by name or domain name. If you see otherwise, please let us know and we will investigate."
Like the sibling comment says, that's not much better. To the majority of people who don't go that far down the list, and would have otherwise seen it if it weren't moved down the list, that information has been effectively hidden.
If you intend to make certain links harder to find, you have the same intentions as straight-up erasing them. It's those intentions I cannot get behind, because I don't trust a company's arbitrary morality to make those decisions, when you literally just get search results essentially verbatim from another search engine.
If you intend to make certain links harder to find, you have the same intentions as straight-up erasing them. It's those intentions I cannot get behind, because I don't trust a company's arbitrary morality to make those decisions, when you literally just get search results essentially verbatim from another search engine.
But how isn't this disingenuous? The reason you'd de-rank is because less users then get exposed to whatever narratives/information you want hidden, the reason why you de-rank.
Users use a search engine for passive exposure to a mix of information for them to then scan, ideally reviewing multiple sources thoroughly, for them then to make a determination/conclusion.
And certainly DDG would have actual statistics on the direct impact the down-ranking had/has, but not the statistics on the externalized impact of how that cascades - e.g. you're biasing their knowledge towards whatever has become the dominant/"acceptable" narrative and reducing the likelihood (greatly) by who sees competing narratives.
In general with searches, what % of clicks occur within say the first 2-3 pages, and were the Russian sites de-ranked to after those 2-3 pages?
Where do 80% of the clicks go for most search - within how many pages of results? Were the sites de-ranked passed that point?
Users use a search engine for passive exposure to a mix of information for them to then scan, ideally reviewing multiple sources thoroughly, for them then to make a determination/conclusion.
And certainly DDG would have actual statistics on the direct impact the down-ranking had/has, but not the statistics on the externalized impact of how that cascades - e.g. you're biasing their knowledge towards whatever has become the dominant/"acceptable" narrative and reducing the likelihood (greatly) by who sees competing narratives.
In general with searches, what % of clicks occur within say the first 2-3 pages, and were the Russian sites de-ranked to after those 2-3 pages?
Where do 80% of the clicks go for most search - within how many pages of results? Were the sites de-ranked passed that point?
> Search ranking and censorship are entirely different things
They are not, actually. Especially when you already have made your plans public previously based on your reaction to a political situation.
They are not, actually. Especially when you already have made your plans public previously based on your reaction to a political situation.
Hi, didn't expect to see you here.
I have a question I always wanted to ask. Why should people trust your privacy centric services when you are famous for your previous project which was essentially a pyramid scheme for harvesting user data, which you then sold along with the data? Any rational person would expect DDG to also be a user data harvesting scheme.
I have a question I always wanted to ask. Why should people trust your privacy centric services when you are famous for your previous project which was essentially a pyramid scheme for harvesting user data, which you then sold along with the data? Any rational person would expect DDG to also be a user data harvesting scheme.
I don't know how you claim that you have not made yourselves the arbiters of truth after posting tweets like https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318
"At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation"
and
"we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) to highlight quality information for rapidly unfolding topics"
Your post here and your tweets tell completely contradictory stories, which only harms your credibility more.
A search engine does have to make a judgement call on what results to rank over other results. However, making that call based on anything but relevancy to the user's query means I'm not going to take your search engine seriously. If anyone but the user is deciding what "russian disinformation" is, you've already lost the game.
Personally, that's fine for me: I don't have to take my search engine seriously to use it, and I dont turn to search engines for my news anymore. In fact, I think the only things I use engines for these days are a replacement for the StackOverflow search bar...
"At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation"
and
"we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) to highlight quality information for rapidly unfolding topics"
Your post here and your tweets tell completely contradictory stories, which only harms your credibility more.
A search engine does have to make a judgement call on what results to rank over other results. However, making that call based on anything but relevancy to the user's query means I'm not going to take your search engine seriously. If anyone but the user is deciding what "russian disinformation" is, you've already lost the game.
Personally, that's fine for me: I don't have to take my search engine seriously to use it, and I dont turn to search engines for my news anymore. In fact, I think the only things I use engines for these days are a replacement for the StackOverflow search bar...
Do you know if DDG also did the same - or perhaps their rankings were already captured by the likes of Reuters et al ("fact checkers") - for the COVID pandemic narrative?
It's quite apparent their desired narrative is falling apart now, where a Pfizer executive publicly admitted they didn't even test for transmissabiity - meanwhile that was arguably the primary promotion point for the mRNA shots propagated by the captured MSM (arguably primarily by big pharma), by politicians (captured heavily by big pharma, enough to be toeing their line); and where Pfizer's CEO at last minute cancelled his in-person testimonial to EU parliament inquiry - arguably because they know they've been caught and will be held accountable by those who aren't toeing their line/profiting from it.
This is the "new" war using "soft" power, a war against all of society that arguably billions of people are now awake to; which speaking of it gets you flagged and lazily downvoted as "conspiracy theorist" to suppress a seemingly endless and growing amount of concrete proof points to support the hypothesis of what's actually going on.
It's quite apparent their desired narrative is falling apart now, where a Pfizer executive publicly admitted they didn't even test for transmissabiity - meanwhile that was arguably the primary promotion point for the mRNA shots propagated by the captured MSM (arguably primarily by big pharma), by politicians (captured heavily by big pharma, enough to be toeing their line); and where Pfizer's CEO at last minute cancelled his in-person testimonial to EU parliament inquiry - arguably because they know they've been caught and will be held accountable by those who aren't toeing their line/profiting from it.
This is the "new" war using "soft" power, a war against all of society that arguably billions of people are now awake to; which speaking of it gets you flagged and lazily downvoted as "conspiracy theorist" to suppress a seemingly endless and growing amount of concrete proof points to support the hypothesis of what's actually going on.
I'm not very inclined to discuss mRNA on a tech forum, but "fact-checkers" do also fall under this kind of umbrella, yeah.
Any large organization presenting what they claim to be the truth is subject to all sorts of unscientific biases, which is why it's so important that people aren't shouted down, that sites aren't de-ranked.
If you let anyone but individual people decide their conclusions, it's a nice, paved, flower-laden walkway to the dystopian corporate hellscape that's bemoaned by the same people who advocate for "fact checkers" and de-ranked search results.
P.S. For those who believe that putting "fact-checkers" in quotes is denying truth, promoting misinformation, etc, etc -- I put it in quotes because even giving them that title gives them more power than they should have.
Any large organization presenting what they claim to be the truth is subject to all sorts of unscientific biases, which is why it's so important that people aren't shouted down, that sites aren't de-ranked.
If you let anyone but individual people decide their conclusions, it's a nice, paved, flower-laden walkway to the dystopian corporate hellscape that's bemoaned by the same people who advocate for "fact checkers" and de-ranked search results.
P.S. For those who believe that putting "fact-checkers" in quotes is denying truth, promoting misinformation, etc, etc -- I put it in quotes because even giving them that title gives them more power than they should have.
"P.S. For those who believe that putting "fact-checkers" in quotes is denying truth, promoting misinformation, etc, etc -- I put it in quotes because even giving them that title gives them more power than they should have."
It's part of the same problem of media et al referencing "experts" or "the science" - where the majority of society seems to blindly trust those words or concepts, trusting that the utterers of it are equally trustworthy.
It's part of the same problem of media et al referencing "experts" or "the science" - where the majority of society seems to blindly trust those words or concepts, trusting that the utterers of it are equally trustworthy.
My dad is a expert video-game fact checker and Half-Life 3 should be coming out tomorrow.
It almost beggars belief to have to say that of course the vaccine testing is on efficacy of infection prevention, not transmissibility. But wouldn't you know it? The less likely you are to get infected and the faster your body clears the virus, the less the virus is or can be transmitted. Yes, peak viral load for infections that do "breakthrough" may be the same as unvaccinated. That's not a smoking gun.
There is a lot of sinister stuff happening in our world, a lot of coordinated efforts against labor and the working class. Tying that narrative to a conspiracies about COVID vaccines rightly nudges you into conspiracy theorist territory.
And that is the last comment I will ever make about vaccines on this site.
There is a lot of sinister stuff happening in our world, a lot of coordinated efforts against labor and the working class. Tying that narrative to a conspiracies about COVID vaccines rightly nudges you into conspiracy theorist territory.
And that is the last comment I will ever make about vaccines on this site.
You admit to there being coordinated efforts against labor and the working class - so how do you deal with the cognitive dissonance with 1) the history that the pharmaceutical industry continuously being a very bad actor with the reward of billions in profit, 2) that pharma industry in the U.S. (for example) accounts for something like 80% of the advertising revenue on all mainstream-legacy media channels (capturing the narrative of what news is able to air), and 3) practically all U.S. politicians on both the Republic and Democrat side are given $$ - lobbied by the pharmaceutical industry?
The rest of what you shared seems to be relatively shallow narratives you've been trained/programmed to believe for you to then parrot.
My question above isn't about "vaccines" - so hopefully you're willing to answer and won't avoid the cognitive dissonance you're certain to encounter if you attempt to answer it; or perhaps we'll see what mental gymnastics you need to use to dismiss the multiple very clear conflicts of interest and guaranteed-obvious influence that pharma has on our society via politicians that make policy decisions - and via narratives propagated to the masses via mainstream-legacy media channels.
The rest of what you shared seems to be relatively shallow narratives you've been trained/programmed to believe for you to then parrot.
My question above isn't about "vaccines" - so hopefully you're willing to answer and won't avoid the cognitive dissonance you're certain to encounter if you attempt to answer it; or perhaps we'll see what mental gymnastics you need to use to dismiss the multiple very clear conflicts of interest and guaranteed-obvious influence that pharma has on our society via politicians that make policy decisions - and via narratives propagated to the masses via mainstream-legacy media channels.
There is zero cognitive dissonance for me. I freely admit to everything you stipulated above in paragraph 1. But none of those statements logically flows to your conclusion, despite how strongly you seem to think they do. Such statements of fact do not implicitly or explicitly compromise the quality of the science and the weight of the evidence for vaccine efficacy, especially when those results are independently verified using multi-source methods.
> The rest of what you shared seems to be relatively shallow narratives you've been trained/programmed to believe for you to then parrot.
What more does this merit than an eye roll? You know nothing about me, but you're telling me all I need to know about you. It's frankly distressing, but such are the times.
> The rest of what you shared seems to be relatively shallow narratives you've been trained/programmed to believe for you to then parrot.
What more does this merit than an eye roll? You know nothing about me, but you're telling me all I need to know about you. It's frankly distressing, but such are the times.
> There is zero cognitive dissonance for me. I freely admit to everything you stipulated above in paragraph 1. But none of those statements logically flows to your conclusion, despite how strongly you seem to think they do. Such statements of fact do not implicitly or explicitly compromise the quality of the science and the weight of the evidence for vaccine efficacy, especially when those results are independently verified using multi-source methods.
You didn't actually support any of your statements or specifically state what's wrong with my logic, you're just saying them as matter of fact - but such are the times.
You didn't actually support any of your statements or specifically state what's wrong with my logic, you're just saying them as matter of fact - but such are the times.
"Coordinated efforts against labor and the working class" doesn't convince anyone of anything. Almost every company ever tried to pay their workers the least they could get away with. There are also "coordinated efforts by labor against the wealthy class" - ie union organizing. Every worker in the world hopes to get paid more, even me. But there's no coordinated effort to lie to you about the fact that covid vaccine helps protect you from getting covid. No one made all the scientists believe that a virus causes covid. Fauci didn't want to get people vaccinated because he was being paid, he studied public health and wasn't an idiot, that is all it took for those professionals to see we should encourage vaccination.
> It's quite apparent their desired narrative is falling apart now, where a Pfizer executive publicly admitted they didn't even test for transmissabiity
This was known when the clinical trial docs where first published. No one said it did at the very beginning, it was never hidden by anyone. The data of reducing transmission was collected when the vaccines began to roll out. And for pre-omicron strains it did reduce transmission.
This whole thing about the recent Pfizer thing is just some anti-vaxx narrative.
This was known when the clinical trial docs where first published. No one said it did at the very beginning, it was never hidden by anyone. The data of reducing transmission was collected when the vaccines began to roll out. And for pre-omicron strains it did reduce transmission.
This whole thing about the recent Pfizer thing is just some anti-vaxx narrative.
Yeah, all the conspiratorial anti-vax BS is just sad. There weren't millions of people killed by getting vaccinated, so all that pre-shot BS about the danger of a new vaccine didn't pan out - because they'd been testing it for years, and it wasn't actually dangerous.
There was an update clarifying that tweet.
https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515637392190935041
https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515637392190935041
The tweet:
"Search ranking and censorship are entirely different things. We make our results useful by ranking spam lower.
We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are also not assessing any individual news stories."
Entirely different things? Are we supposed to just swallow that statement and pretend one doesn't cause suppression - even if it isn't 100% suppression like outright censorship is?
And, if it's not political, then why did the down-ranking occur after political incident.. and the rest of the tweet is trying to minimize.
"Search ranking and censorship are entirely different things. We make our results useful by ranking spam lower.
We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are also not assessing any individual news stories."
Entirely different things? Are we supposed to just swallow that statement and pretend one doesn't cause suppression - even if it isn't 100% suppression like outright censorship is?
And, if it's not political, then why did the down-ranking occur after political incident.. and the rest of the tweet is trying to minimize.
I saw it - it didn't help their case much:
>Search ranking and censorship are entirely different things. We make our results useful by ranking spam lower.
They're only different things if the ranking decision is based on relevance. If you de-rank something based on political agenda, that's censorship. But hey, it looks like they talk about that:
>We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are also not assessing any individual news stories.
Why did the initial tweets say the opposite? Are they conflating "russian disinformation" with spam?
Frankly it reads like the PR hit was larger than they expected.
>Search ranking and censorship are entirely different things. We make our results useful by ranking spam lower.
They're only different things if the ranking decision is based on relevance. If you de-rank something based on political agenda, that's censorship. But hey, it looks like they talk about that:
>We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are also not assessing any individual news stories.
Why did the initial tweets say the opposite? Are they conflating "russian disinformation" with spam?
Frankly it reads like the PR hit was larger than they expected.
Thank you for this clarification!
He "clarified" by twisting and lying about the situation. Simply said - down-ranking is censorship, whether you agree with it or not. Pushing a result to page 3 or 4 in a search engine means that 99.99% of people won't see it, effectively hiding (ie. censoring) it from public view.
Could you share more about this please?
Some quick reading of SearxNG's docs* and testing out an instance** shows some very good search results.
> If you run your own instance, it's better to share that instance with friends or family so they can dilute your search queries with theirs, and it makes it much harder for your instance to be tracked the same as they'd track you. Or, you can use a public instance which is better for privacy, but worse for security and customizability.
Is there no way to clear all state after each query, or every 24 hours, etc? I'd wonder if sharing with family just means you'd build a closer data association with them. Or, what kind of things do you find important to customise (and why?) that aren't configured by public SearxNG instances?
* https://docs.searxng.org
** https://searx.space/
Some quick reading of SearxNG's docs* and testing out an instance** shows some very good search results.
> If you run your own instance, it's better to share that instance with friends or family so they can dilute your search queries with theirs, and it makes it much harder for your instance to be tracked the same as they'd track you. Or, you can use a public instance which is better for privacy, but worse for security and customizability.
Is there no way to clear all state after each query, or every 24 hours, etc? I'd wonder if sharing with family just means you'd build a closer data association with them. Or, what kind of things do you find important to customise (and why?) that aren't configured by public SearxNG instances?
* https://docs.searxng.org
** https://searx.space/
Well all Searx does is act as a single-request-in, multiple-requests-out proxy. Whatever you search on it, you search on those same sites, just from the IP address of the Searx instance. They will assume your Searx instance is a person, and build a profile of its searches. Eventually, if you're the only one using it, and someone is able to link your search history on your Searx instance to your history on that same engine from before you used Searx, they have an uninterrupted search history / profile built on you.
Building a profile of one person using queries from multiple people is difficult, and it gives you plausible deniability if it's ever brought against you in some accusation.
So I guess I'm not entirely sure what you mean by clear state. If you mean clear state on the instance side of things, the point is that it doesn't really keep any state unless you want it to. The problem is the state that is stored on the search engine side of things.
The more people in your instance of choice, the more anonymous you become. But since you're not the one running the public instances, you don't have the power to tweak all the settings you may want to. There are plenty of public instances that have great defaults though, but you're ultimately trusting that instance owner to not log your queries as well. So make sure it's a trustworthy-enough instance. Or use multiple instances, as a counter to that.
Ultimately, even the worst-configured public Searx instance I've used in the past, was much better than using any mainstream search engine directly. The most important settings are which engines you want to pull results from. Most public instances don't let you set all of those, if I remember correctly. So being able to choose those may or may not be important to you. Again, some public instances have pretty good search engine settings.
Building a profile of one person using queries from multiple people is difficult, and it gives you plausible deniability if it's ever brought against you in some accusation.
So I guess I'm not entirely sure what you mean by clear state. If you mean clear state on the instance side of things, the point is that it doesn't really keep any state unless you want it to. The problem is the state that is stored on the search engine side of things.
The more people in your instance of choice, the more anonymous you become. But since you're not the one running the public instances, you don't have the power to tweak all the settings you may want to. There are plenty of public instances that have great defaults though, but you're ultimately trusting that instance owner to not log your queries as well. So make sure it's a trustworthy-enough instance. Or use multiple instances, as a counter to that.
Ultimately, even the worst-configured public Searx instance I've used in the past, was much better than using any mainstream search engine directly. The most important settings are which engines you want to pull results from. Most public instances don't let you set all of those, if I remember correctly. So being able to choose those may or may not be important to you. Again, some public instances have pretty good search engine settings.
Is this a new way of saying that they use Webkit?