> In fact, search advertisers buy search ads by bidding on keywords, not people. It makes intuitive sense, too. If you search for ‘car’, you are more likely to respond to a car ad than something you searched for last week.
This keyword-based advertising is our primary business model.
The rest of the post is a rant about user tracking.
Rant seems extremely strong - how about we go with well thought through set of opinions that the CEO of Duck Duck Go is rigorously applying to his product.
I personally found his argument so persuasive I intend to set everything to DuckDuckGo again now.
Went to try it for a week to see if it was viable. Haven't looked back and have never needed to go to Google's search engine for a year now. Best feature is by far the Stack Overflow 'instant answers'!
Same. I use Firefox for Android which is helpful if you have searches you know for a fact DDG won't be able to figure because Firefox let's you select a different search engine instead from the bottom. I do this for sports and location specific searches.
When I moved to DDG, it took me more than a week to tune my searches for it. I was completely trained to the google interpreter and ddg works different. Now I use slightly different phrases, or ordering and it is great. I only use !g for very specific technical searches, like obscure errors.
Just use it. There are no special tricks or hints needed, it is that good.
Biggest differences to me is that Google seems to handle natural questions like "how do i..." in a "smart" way whereas ddg seems to be more altavista like in that your keywords have higher weight rather than trying to outsmart you. Another difference is that Google is much better on local search thanks to its strong bonds with Google maps, like checking opening hours. For anything not maps related DDG has been my default for can't even remember how many years, over 5.
If you want to directly search other sites without having to choose a different engine in Firefox: if you search through DDG, you can put !g before or after your query and it’ll forward you to google.
There are a bunch of these. !a forwards to Amazon, !w to Wikipedia, etc.
> I have it as my primary search engine now too, but I find myself constantly using !g because the results suck.
It's the opposite for me. I use primarily google, but when the results suck (which is quite often), I switch to duckduckgo to obtain a sensible search.
It’s usually good enough for me 90-95% and if I need something that google does better I’ll just use !sp as a proxy to those results. !g is a last resort.
The "just" in having to analyze some results and come to the conclusion that I need to rerun the query with some prefix is not so convincing. I've already wasted time at that point.
You still have to analyze results anyway. Or do you only take the first result that Google provides?
As to rerun the query, that's what the back button is for. Simply hit back, add your bang and enter. Most browsers keep that page in cache so going back is pretty quick.
Whether or not companies are paying Quora, it's common for startup founders to answer questions there.
Sometimes the posts are blatant ads that don't really answer the question, or they add nothing that was not already answered. But sometimes they do answer the question and provide value, while also subtly pointing to a product. I think the latter is acceptable, and I do it occasionally myself. (Example: https://www.quora.com/What-kinds-of-lights-are-best-to-comba...)
Consider this: founders have the strongest conviction for solving a given problem. They often created a product because they saw a gap in the market, and they tend to be domain experts. So, they are highly qualified to answer questions within their area of expertise.
If a post provides value and just so happens to offer a relevant solution with financial strings attached, I have absolutely no problem with it. I might even end up purchasing it, because by searching or asking questions on Quora, I am looking for a solution myself.
It wasn't always this way. Quora's user base expanded heavily and the quality of content suffered. When the community was smaller questions and answers were more informative. Its slowly becoming a glorified Yahoo answers.
I've been using it for years (how many years I can't quite recall, but at least 4 or 5). Haven't looked back. If I really need Google results, I can always stick "!g " in front of the search.
I made the switch on all my devices about 6 weeks ago. I lasted 5 weeks. At least for quickly finding relevant programming documentation, I didn't think the results were on par with Google.
You can use the g! prefix and it will go to Google. I found DDG plenty good enough for my use case, and in the rare case I can't find it there I just use g! and bam.
Bang commands are such a wonderful feature on DDG. Not just for searching other engines when the DDG results aren't what I'm looking for but also for ecommerce sites. The frontpage of most sites are extremely heavyweight and you have to go through a ton of garbage just to get to a search box. Being able to add !homedepot to a DDG search and have it send me to the search results page at Home Depot and not the DDG spidering of the site is pretty nifty feature. I do most of my searches of shopping sites that way now.
If you still want to support DuckDuckGo, you might want to use a browser that lets you prefix search quesies with a one or two letter combo for the search engine to use. Chrome and Vivaldi have this feature and I think Firefox does as well, although I exclusively use its search bar instead, so I am not completely sure.
I can’t get over ther branding. I know this is a terrible reason for not switching but I can’t stand their name or logo. If they were named something more modern and less annoying I’d consider. Call me shallow but branding is important if I’m going to use it every day.
I short while ago, I was surprised to find my tech-illiterate family members and friends using DuckDuckGo without me having the privacy talk with them (many of them cited that they feel Google has finally crossed the line).
The thing is that people (including those who don't use DDG) remember "the goofy-looking duck". DuckDuckGo would be extremely foolish to throw away the mind share they built so far.
Besides, for whatever it's worth, I happen to like the name and logo. I think it's very memorable and has character unlike generic startup name #13.
> The rest of the post is a rant about user tracking.
Almost. There's also:
> "The only other way we’ve found so far, which currently accounts for a much smaller portion of our revenue, is non-tracking affiliate partnerships with Amazon and eBay.
> "When you visit those sites through DuckDuckGo, including when using !bangs, and subsequently make a purchase, we receive a small commission. This mechanism operates anonymously and there is no personally identifiable information exchanged between us and Amazon or eBay.
Has he never heard of retargeting? That model is essentially bidding on people. And I wouldnt be surprised if retargeting will become the most popular form or advertising targeting.
He makes the distinction later on in the article. "Google is not a search company, they're an advertising company." Google has their display network all across the internet, DDG does not.
Retargeting is a popular model for advertising companies, where the retargeting follows you around the internet. Retargeting is much less valuable if you are just a search company.
I think there's a problem with this model however. When the highest bidder wins, consumers and advertisers can lose, big.
I understand how DDG has to say this is the best and smartest way to do things because they have to live with their promise of not creeping on their visitors - so they can't use the same analytics that someone like Google has. It's just marketing.
But the ads that go to the top should be the most valuable, not necessarily go to the buyer with the deepest pockets.
I suppose you could say "car" ads cost $x per click, and then let all advertisers rotate, but that's not helpful either. You could measure which one gets clicked the most and have it move to the top, but that can be gamed. If you had any way of knowing how long someone spends on the advertised websites, or base it off of social media reviews or allow consumers with verified accounts to rate ads, that might work better.
I don't know, I just can't trust an ad format where I know the top click just spends the most money.
That's not how this model works. There are three general models of online advertising:
- CPM: you pay per impression (ie how often the ad is seen)
- CPC: cost per click. You only pay when the user clicks.
- CPA: you only pay when the user clicks and does something (eg buys something)
Display advertising (putting ads on third-party websites eg AdSense) is primarily CPM. Search advertising is primarily CPC (or at least this is how Google operates; I assume DDG is similar).
It's important to understand the implications of this.
In a CPC model the system that selects what ads to show you is doing so to maximize revenue. Since they only make revenue when you click a lot of effort is spent in determining the predicted CTR (click through rate) because:
Revenue = # of impressions x pCTR
So it's not just a question of who pays the most for an ad (that's how display advertising works largely) because a $1 CPC with 1% CTR earns more revenue than a $10 CPC with 0.01% CTR.
This is why I have less problem with the CPC search advertising model than pretty much any other model because your interests and the interests of the search engine are largely aligned. You want the results that are most relevant to you and that might be an organic search result or an ad. As long as the ads are clearly display as such, it's fine.
Also with search there is intent. You've searched for something so there's something you want. Who's to say an ad won't be the most relevant result?
You missed out the other model of cost per slot, e.g. Daring Fireball’s ad, various podcasts, etc. While you’re paying for visibility it’s not a direct CPM as there’s a fixed cost for the time.
It seems that what you are describing though would tend over time to result in a search engine that is principally geared towards returning commercial results rather than amateur/hobbyist results since the interests of search/potential advertisers are always going to be in closer alignment then hobbyists who will almost never be running an ad campaign.
This has been my main criticism of Google's direction the last 15 years or so. Seems like search results use to populate handsomely with personal sites and blogs run by hobbyists uninterested in extracting a dollar from the visitor. If the search results could return either (a) a link to a book sold on Amazon or (b) some Phd's site discussing the topic it seems likely that (a) wins and (b) gets buried somewhere on page 2.
The M in CPM is the Roman numeral for 1000. It's an archaic term, and should be replaced with the SI unit for 1000. Though coining the phrase "kilo-impression" would be a stretch.
> I don't know, I just can't trust an ad format where I know the top click just spends the most money.
Why? That's exactly how it works every where else: Radio, TV, Billboards. If two people want the same spot, the person who ponies up more money gets the spot.
You already trust your search engine to rank results based on your search terms. They can do the same thing for their ads without having to do additional tracking. These features can pretty easily be added to the auction if you consider bad ads as a cost to your company.
You end up showing the ad that maximizes something like bid * click_rate + quality_score * quality_value. quality_value can be tweaked to change the balance between short-term revenue and ad quality.
>But the ads that go to the top should be the most valuable, not necessarily go to the buyer with the deepest pockets.
It is my understanding that similar to Google, the first couple of links might be ads, but the rest are organic.
I just did a search for a movie I like - To the right is an infobox with a blurb from Wikipedia + links to rotten tomatoes and IMDB. Under it is an amazon ad to buy a copy.
The top 5 links are IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, a definition of the word, and a trailer.
Seems pretty unobtrusive and on point to me. If I wanted to buy a blu-ray of the movie I'd probably click that ad.
> But the ads that go to the top should be the most valuable...
Why? I'm not using DDG for the advertisements. I'm using them for search.
> I just can't trust an ad format where I know the top click just spends the most money.
This seems orthogonal to whether the actual target is a keyword or user-tracked data. If two firms want to target the same demographic (e.g., Ford and Chevy want to target 20-something Dodge Ram owners who search for 'truck'), something has to decide which advertisements to display on top.
What if they actually disclosed the CPC or CPA value?
I know a lot of the big-money keywords used to be things like lead-gen arbitrage in the legal and financial sector. If someone is searching for "life insurance quotes" and they see that the top advertiser is some comparison-shopping site paying $50 per click, will they still think of them as an unbiased referral service, or someone who has to bury that $50 cost somewhere?
> "Here are a few actionable things companies can do to remain profitable without tracking the maximum amount of information possible on consumers:"
Can we add to his list:
> Offer a paid option such that consumers who want to pay for privacy / less ads / no ads can.
> Along with a paid option, companies should develop partnerships with like minded peers.
For example, DDG could pair with various VPN providers and the DDG paid tier could included "free" with your VPN fee. That is, one payment, not two, two related services.
Offer a paid option such that consumers who want to pay for privacy / less ads / no ads can
The problem is that the customers with disposable income to pay to see no ads are exactly the people that admen want to reach. So it's unlikely that any ad-supported company will offer this. It would be as good as admitting to their real customers that their inventory (i.e. us) was of "low quality".
And the customers who pay to see no ads are also exactly the people who would refuse to click on the ads anyway and likely also are running an ad blocker, so the admen would have lost nothing (and possibly gained from not paying for wasted impressions).
Having a no-ad tier means you can reasonably argue that those getting ads have opted into them, and thus are more valuable to the advertisers.
I am also the type of users who dismiss any and every ads I see (after ad blocking), such as the infuriating Instagram Ads. I always dismiss & report them.
I figured at some point Facebook would see that I don't want to see them, and cease wasting advertisers money on me, but I suppose Facebook doesn't really care who it shows its ads to, as long as the advertisers already paid. I don't understand why advertisers keep paying, though.
If YouTube can offer a no ads model then it can't be impossible. Mind you, Google is likely doing other trickery. But certainly there's got to be alternatives to ad blockers, etc.
"Offer a paid option such that consumers who want to pay for privacy / less ads / no ads can."
I've pushed for this for a long time. Google and Facebook could do this. An annual fee tied to whatever minimum amount they make per user in ads makes all their services private for that user. They can even run the same stacks on different machines stored in different DB's for further isolation. Won't cost them much of anything extra given their existing datacenters and management software. Drop in the bucket. Might also have benefit of a sure thing vs advertisers whims.
That would take us back to a clear choice for consumers of being the customer or the product. We could vote with our wallet. I'm sure most would vote to be the product but the number of paying customers (esp businesses) should be significant.
I like DDG, but claiming that their ads are based only on keywords is just not true. They are at least also based on location. I just tried "dishwasher" and it brings up ads in French from local stores. But this is natural, because without the location most ads would probably be meaningless.
The question is then, how far can you go by using the information available only in the user's HTTP request? Can you use the user's OS and device information? Where is the line exactly that DDG doesn't want to cross?
Edit: I just realized that the answer is probably: yes DDG can use all available information to improve targeting, but it won't store it.
When you use it for ads, but don't store it, how do you prove to your advertisers that you are keeping their contracts and showing the ads to the right target group?
I'll probably be downvoted to hell, but I have to say this. I'm Ukrainian, so I have bias against anything related to Russian government, especially services pretending to be improving my privacy. So, my question is, what is DuckDuckGo's relationship to Yandex, a company fully controlled by Russian government and having track record sharing personal information with Russian security services?
DuckDuckGo seems to be a metasearch engine that pulls from other sources and integrates the results somehow. It mainly uses Bing/Yahoo search. Yandex is also one of its sources. It shouldn't have a lot of risk if it's anonymizing the data sent to Yandex. I think there's bigger risk in network-level hacks of Ukraine by Russia where they could look at traffic directly or via stolen logs.
DuckDuckGo has a deal with Yandex to display search results from them on some searches. If you search for something in Russian, you'll see a "in partnership with Yandex" message in the corner of the search results page.
> Alarmingly, Google now deploys hidden trackers on 76% of websites across the web to monitor your behavior
Is this referring to Google Analytics? If so, I feel like "Google deploys" isn't quite fair compared to "Google's tracker is deployed" or something to that effect. But in any case, the phrasing is confusing enough to me to post here, since I want to know if it means something other than GA, which I understand and can block with uMatrix.
This is the CEO of DDG deliberately spreading FUD to innocent people on platforms like Quora in my book. And he's a regular visitor there hijacking many threads promoting his business. I reported his out of place promotional answers once or twice, saying if the CEO of a company is spamming, will it not count as a spam (as opposed to normal people)? Quora didn't remove the answer, for some reason. This one is of course a slightly relevant answer here, but again with his usual dose of competitor bashing and spreading FUD that is a little out of taste for me personally.
Also, may be he's speaking it just for the sake of promotion and doesn't take it too seriously himself, but the quality of search results can definitely be greatly improved when you know more about a person than just their search keywords (or even their country). If he actually believes what he says on Quora, I won't place my bet on his business doing too great in the future.
1. The first example (what he writes in his answer) - when I type "dishwasher" in DDG, every shopping website it lists on the first page is from USA, and I don't even live in the same continent. Even when I enable my country results through the button shown on top of the page, the shopping websites are not even the top ones in my country. When I type that in Google, it lists not only the top e-sellers in the country, the most popular local stores in my area as well. What will the advertisers achieve when they don't even know which place I live in? Who will sell me that dishwasher?
2. When I type Zoo, it's pretty damn clear I want to search a zoo in my area. DDG's results even when country is enabled are plain stupid. Write in Google, and it tells me exactly what I want to know.
3. When I type 'Jaguar' in the search box, all top link results are of the Jaguar car, but all the top image results are the Jaguar animal. Google is much more consistent here.
I can give tens of examples of why personalization of search results is not that bad an idea for the value it adds. Of course, there are very important negative side effects to it, and that's why we have DDG. But I would have respected his opinion much more had he acknowledged that personalization of search results adds a great value, but also has other consequences, like any balanced personal who can see both sides of a coin.
I live in the UK and have DDG pointing at the UK. I'm currently in Kenya.
Searching for dishwasher on DDG gives Currys, John Lewis, Argos, appliancesdirect, and ao.com. All of those are UK based, exactly what I would expect
Searching google.co.uk gives Currys, BestBuy (which gives a choice between CA, US, MX), Lowes (US), Home Depot Canada, Home Depot U.S.
DDG is far better
When I search for Zoo on DDG, I get IMDB about a TV series, Chester Zoo (UK's most visited), London Zoo, and Wiki about the tv series. On Google.co.uk I get stuff about the TV series, Nairobi national park, and then stuff about Boston USA, Berlin, and Madrid.
You have to select the country for it to show the UK results, I already wrote that (that is a kind of personalization, isn't it?). For the Zoo, I'm not sure, does everyone in UK search for and visit only that most visited one and not the one in their vicinity? Then we don't even have remotely same expectations from a Search. Do people also visit the most popular "Laptop repair store" in UK regardless of where they live? Google gives me results in my area, starting from the nearest one - of course, provided it has sufficient information about your City/Zip code etc. Let's not deny that it's extremely useful in abstract (keeping aside privacy based consequences).
P.S. : Had DDG been far better, they wouldn't need those Google Bangs that many users praising DDG keep finding themselves going back to.
not in my case. i let google collect everything they can, and the service offered by them is miles ahead of DDG.
dishwasher on google brings up argos, john lewis and a bunch of shops near me.
on ddg it’s US only.
zoo brings up the nearest zoos around me as well as a bunch of other uk zoos.
ddg is again US.
ddg doesn’t even know my location!
and this is, from my understanding, one of the reasons people are using ddg in the first place.
and the reason i avoid going ddg. i need context aka state that’s already on their servers; instead of mentioning state each time (i’m in london and searching for vs just searching for)
Oh look another anonymous question on Quora about a company, answered by the CEO of said company. And it is answered in such a direct way without any marketing for his service at all. \s
These Q&A things on Quora are getting ridiculous. Without all the fluff that thing would condense to one sentence: We make money by context search ads and affiliate commission on !bang searches.
The thing that I thought made Google even better (back in the 200xs) was that Google did no advertising for their service. People just recommended their service because it was so useful and good. DDG can't live up to that standard and so they have to highlight their built-in privacy whenever possible. It's like everything they offer, they rub it in your face. It feels like they don't care about the search problem but only about being so much more privacy-focused than Google.
I can switch to StartPage and have Google + Privacy, with DDG it is just privacy without any good search results.
Lest we not forget that DDG plainly refuses any external auditors to verify their claims of user privacy, despite having received a large investment recently and employing about 50 people (or more now) in full time.
In this case, DDG asks users to have "faith" that their privacy is indeed being respected.
Not defending DDG but it is ridiculuos to ask for a company for auditing to probe their claims. There is no legal enforcement for that. If DDG lies and they are discovered they will loose their user base. It is enough with that.
Yes, but all we can observe for now is that we constantly send the same data to DDG as we did send to Google and for some reason we are supposed to trust DDG.
It isn't a too wide far-fetched that DDG could be collecting all data in silence and once they have enough of it (or are big enough to survive losing a part of their user base) start capitalising off of it.
I don't trust DDG any more than I do trust Google. In fact I trust Google with their boatloads of great engineers (of which we have learned that they do have some sense of moral and ethics) more than a small company that could easily be forced to capitalise on their user-data because of their shallow pockets.
You can apply the same thinking to zillions of companies marketing themselves. It is unfeasible and naive to promote auditing information. At the end you would be harming small companies who cannot afford auditing.
Quora is garbage. It's full of self-proclaimed experts, who give the impression that their answers are more valuable than those found on other questions/answering sites.
It used to be really useful, in the beginning, when people actually contributed to the platform for the sake of curating knowledge. Now it feels like an advertising platform. Either for companies or "influencer". Posts get artificially prolonged, people add stock images to make people click on the posts.
It’s been a while since I’ve ran across a quora post that wasn’t some form of advertising or follower building. I mostly do “search + Reddit” these days unless I know the topic wont be well covered there if it’s technical in nature. For things like product reviews Reddit has been ok, but not without manipulation by companies too. I guess at the end of the day you always have to read between the lines.
>Almost looks like he’s accusing Eric of claiming Google wants to be as unscrupulous in the way they operate as possible without being caught
Eric has said in public it is official Google policy to walk right up to the "creepy" line, so the accusation is not unwarranted given that google operates worldwide, and not every country has the same views on privacy as Americans.
That's a pretty fair accusation I would say, they both do borderline illegal tax planning and manipulate search results for their own benefit.
They also have deployed a hugely broken ip management system on youtube, and of course (like everyone else) they use workers on short term contracts to moderate all the violent shit that gets posted with little regard for the psychological impact on their workers of reviewing if something is child porn all day.
I started using DDG and Firefox after Chrome v69. I couldn't always find what I needed with DDG so I use g! when the search doesn't cut it (~20% of the time) but for the other 80% it's great. I've loved some unique features like the stack overflow first answer integration.I also noticed a big increase in Google advertising recently. Ads in the Gmail app and new types of ads--shopping ads below the YouTube video above the description and movie poster type ads on the right panel of some movie trailers. I bet their ad revenue in the next quarter is going to increase significantly. Is there a new person in charge or new decisions in place to serve more ads?
(sorry about the Google search heavy comment but DDG revenue generation got me thinking about Google revenue)
I switched about two years ago and do not miss any Google stuff. I think one very important point is persistent search: if I type in a query in my browser, I get the exact same result as in p.e. in my moms browser. A things that is so annoying in Google, because even an incognito browser give personalised search result. So the experience in fast finding tech help in Google can inverse on an non techy device. Using ddg: always same experience. A feature you don't want to miss, if you often use other devices, like helping friends and family.
I generally agree. I'd like the same search to return the same results. But I bet there are things I'd be willing for it to be different. I can only think of 'food near me' though
Of course, it wasn't meant too generally. I also don't want to get the same results over years p.e. To summarize: I strongly prefere non personalized results, persistence was the wrong term here. So "food near me" should give us the same results, when we're at the same place (& nearly same time).
> Though first, if you’re not familiar with DuckDuckGo, we are an Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs.
I don't think that's really fair. By that argument, every magazine, radio, and TV show are ad companies. That includes NPR which runs ads for sponsors and ads for pledges. NYTimes, The Guardian, etc...
Do all those companies make money from ads? Sure. Does that make them ad companies? No, they are first and foremost companies that provide a service for the user. If that service is good enough (gets enough viewers) then the ads are seen/heard. If not they go out of business. Because of this they have an incentive to provide the best of that service. Best search, best TV shows (drama/news/comedy/etc...), best music, best talk shows, best articles, etc. Where "best" = gets the most viewers. If Google's search starts sucking people will go elsewhere so they are a search company. Chiat Day and Dentsu are ad companies. They sell ads.
The argument is completely fair and correct. Every media company supported by ads is an ad company. They market the readers, listeners, or watchers to advertisers.
The only thing the content needs to do is attract enough people to convince someone it's worth the money to put a message in front of the gathered audience. The content doesn't have to be the "best" it just has to be the attractive enough to draw an audience. A train wreck we'll draw an audience without being good at all.
Ask it this way: if Google could find a revenue model with users paying for search with no ads, would they turn off ads? Yes, probably. If Google could turn off search and still make as much money just showing ads? No.
(The vast majority of Google's ad revenue comes.from search advertising.)
Google is a search company that depends critically on ads to exist. It also has an advertising company component to it, but the core value is search.
Otherwise, you'd have to conclude that duckduckgo is also an advertising company. Neither of those statements is correct.
This sound bite quip about Google tries to reduce a large and complex business to one word, which doesn't serve accuracy or truth.
> If Google could turn off search and still make as much money just showing ads? No.
You're not serious right? Google doesn't run a search engine for the fun of it, they're a for-profit company, if they can pull out an extra margin without search they would do that immediately. The core value is absolutely not search, search is an acquisition channel to bring in customers to click on ads. No one is paying them for searches.
You're right that DDG is an advertising company as well, who also have search as their primary (only?) acquistion channel. However their customer base is specifically looking for alternatives to google and one of the core value propositions of that is to have privacy and minimal user tracking.
You're confusing source of revenue with source of value. Both Google and DDG offer value by providing desirable search results (and other services).
As I said: for both companies, the revenue source is fungible. The core value is not. DDG would still be DDG with a different revenue model. It would not be DDG without search.
The two big US search engines use personalization to give you better results. One of them is your main partner. You accuse only the other of evil-doing.
Biased towards Google ? I stated my opinion: I _trust_ Google. I do _not_ trust a company that chooses to increase their revenue by numerous smearing campaigns.
As for putting down a 'competitor' [sic]: Google owns 'duck.com' via its On2 acquisition. What do they show if you visit the page ? "If you meant to visit the search engine DuckDuckGo, click here."
"The OP" works at Google precisely because they think Google is a force of good in the world, a company I'm proud to work for, not the other way around.
This is what you said, and it's clearly biased because you work for Google. That is the definition of bias.
> Would you trust Google, a company that has delivered real value, has helped democratize access to knowledge at a global scale and has everything to lose if it was revealed that they are misusing sensitive information
Solid argument. Everyone that has a positive opinion about Google works for them. You might want to search for the threads of my not positive opinions as well though.
Google has misused information in the past. For example, they used to mine emails from Google Apps accounts for data even though they explicitly said they wouldn't, until it was found out and they stopped. I also disagree that I should trust a company that has provided "value" because I have found value in using Facebook since it lets me connect with people and friends that I otherwise wouldn't be able to, but I distrust them because they make money from my data and have, for example, used the number that was supposed to be used for SMS 2FA for advertising.
You may not trust DDG and their search providers but
Why would you trust Google?
I trust that DDG pseudo-anonymizes my search queries.
I'd like for Google to not make wild ML based guesses on my searches AND other activities in Googlespace. Since you work at Google you should know what I am talking about.
The advantage of DDG is that potential misuse of my data is greatly minimized over Google ecosystem.
In an ideal world search would be completely separated from other activities (Maps, Mail, Video, Phone etc etc).
Siderant:
Also Google search quality has homogenized over the years. It is debatable if that is an improvement.
That is you only get main authoritative(SO,Wikipedia,etc) sources OR SEOed results in Top 10.
It is rare to see an honest enthusiast page in Top 10.
I realize that it is a hard problem to solve but it seems Google researchers have not progressed.
Your argument would be stronger, I think, if it were less pro-Google and more focused on drawing an equivalence by pointing out that relying on Yandex dilutes DDG's privacy promise.
"Google is good and trustworthy" is not a strong argument these days; "Google is the lesser of two evils" might be.
> Google, a company that [...] has everything to lose if it was revealed that they are misusing sensitive information. [...] Privacy is all about trust. I _trust_ Google.
Facebook was caught with the cat in the bag regarding users' privacy and what did it lose? Google is too big to lose at this point.
> Would you trust Google, a company that has delivered real value, has helped democratize access to knowledge at a global scale and has everything to lose if it was revealed that they are misusing sensitive information
This is so generous to Google that it's almost comical. This is like claiming that if a company like Experian had a data breach, they'd lose everything. Except they were responsible for the largest consumer data breach in history, and they're doing just fine.
Google is entrenched, they can misuse data without it affecting their bottom line. No, I do not trust Google.
This keyword-based advertising is our primary business model.
The rest of the post is a rant about user tracking.