Gnome's Web Browser Ditches Google For DuckDuckGo

https://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2013-08.html#D27

by jeena • 13 years ago

226 135 13 years ago

people.gnome.org

chatman• 13 years ago

Very welcome step. User privacy should be of utmost importance for all GNU/Linux distros. Unfortunately, users of Ubuntu are subjected to privacy intruding malware (that sends their queries to Amazon). Its about time the distros followed GNOME's step and override Firefox's default search engine to DDG as well.

hkmurakami3• 13 years ago

I'm a new Ubuntu user who's not super savvy but am considerinng moving to another distro due to these malware issues. Which distro would you recommend I move to? Mint?

wfn• 13 years ago

Depends, I guess. I'd check out Debian and maybe, yes, Mint.

The thing to realize is that you can use any kind of desktop environment on any of the main distros. With Ubuntu, moving from its default DE can sometimes result in certain hiccups. Other distros are more DE-modular; that's the feeling I get when working on a Debian desktop, at least.

Overall, Debian is a very user-friendly system (or rather, it exposes the same kinds of interfaces as Ubuntu does, once the leaky UI abstractions in Ubuntu do start leaking. ;)

ewzimm2• 13 years ago

Ubuntu GNOME

zachlatta3• 13 years ago

I highly, highly recommend Linux Mint (with Cinnamon) to those looking for an Ubuntu alternative. Cinnamon is a great desktop environment and Mint, in many ways, is Ubuntu without the privacy issues.

sampo2• 13 years ago

The easiest thing would be to just turn off the internet search option from the dash, or maybe uninstall the Amazon lens (but maybe there are other similar lenses...). Or change from Unity to another Desktop Environment (Gnome, Xfce, KDE, Cinnamon or whatever).

Unless you want to make a statement, then changing the distro might be the gesture you want.

dombili• 13 years ago

elementary OS.

mintplant• 13 years ago

    sudo aptitude remove unity-lens-shopping

Don't be fooled by the FUD. It's easy to turn off and not that big a deal, but people who are already biased against Ubuntu like to use this to try to scare folks away.

dylz2• 13 years ago

I've seen http://elementaryos.org/ being paraded around a bit, no experiecnce with it tho

richardwhiuk• 13 years ago

"User privacy should be of utmost importance for all GNU/Linux distros."

Why? It's a feature which takes a large amount of work to implement, has a series of poor tradeoffs, won't actually increase the size of the user base much, is incredibly hard to do well and is very hard to market to users. Not to mention the fact that a large number of GNU/Linux distros are aimed at markets where such user land improvements are largely immaterial (e.g. on servers).

The simple fact is that most users don't care about privacy in the same sense that DDG cares about privacy. If they did, then there would be a huge economic incentive for everyone to make these sorts of changes.

hoffcoder• 13 years ago

In light of the recent leaks, there is a rising consensus that privacy protection should not be underestimated. If it is, then it is prone to put to use by a third party without taking any permission from the end-user, which is unethical. This is all the more important in the open-source world because many people use open-source products because of their ethical and 'open' paradigms. Proprietary code by their very nature bind us to their whims, but open-source is all about freedom. Even if your hypothesis is true, ie even if most users don't take privacy very seriously today, I bet it is pretty soon going to change.

nilved• 13 years ago

The newsworthy thing to me is that this hadn't happened already.

overshard• 13 years ago

I've been using DuckDuckGo for months now and over the past few weeks it's results have gotten considerably better. I wonder if this is because a massive amount of new users are consistently using it overall improving it's results?

Overall I think this is a great change though!

BitMastro• 13 years ago

Honest question: if DuckDuckGo doesn't track the users, how can it improve when more users are using it?

jvehent• 13 years ago

Not tracking the user's personal information doesn't mean you're not tracking the number of clicks, or calculate geoip stats.

mbrubeck• 13 years ago

In addition to aggregate usage stats, there's also the indirect (and slower) route: more users -> more ad impressions -> higher revenue -> more employees or other resources available to improve the service.

fhd24• 13 years ago

Working for a company that takes privacy very seriously, I can say that it can be a PITA. Worth doing, but still a PITA. We had to resort to some clever trickery just to count monthly active users without any sort of unique identifier. I bet DDG faces similar challenges.

LukeShu2• 13 years ago

I'm not sure if they are still as responsive on Twitter as they used to be, but if you tweeted at them with a specific search term that gave poor results, they would act directly on that. It was cool to see your own input make a difference.

hkmurakami3• 13 years ago

After many months of zero Japanese support, DDG seems to now have support. It's been great!

psbp• 13 years ago

I've been reading these comments about DDG for what feels like years now. Was it so terrible to begin with or is considerable an overstatement?

It can't be improving so quickly and still pretty shitty for such a long period of time.

LukeShu2• 13 years ago

I'd say it's improving for different categories of searches. Because for a long time users were largely technical, it's search for tech stuff has been pretty good for a long time (in general, there are a few sub-categories in that that have lagged[1]). Where, searching for an author or book might have terrible results. So, when these people say it has improved, they mean it has improved for the kind of searches that that person does. As more people use it, and suggest improvements[2], it will approach being good for all kinds of searches.

[1] It still isn't very good at searching for specific error messages. It definitely used to show obscure projects on GitHub way too often. You'd do a search for 'getty' and some 3-commit project with a name containing getty would be the first hit. Also, I think it's actually gotten worse at finding Rails API stuff.

[2] It's been a while since I tried, but if you tweet at them with a search term with a poor result, they will try to figure out how to tweak the algorithm to make it better. It's really cool to see them act so directly on your suggestions.

GoodIntentions• 13 years ago

I don't think it was _terrible_.

It just doesn't give as accurate results as Google in some searches, I assume due to the rafts of information collected about users - a trade off I will make happily.

pmahoney• 13 years ago

I wonder if there's an element of users learning how to optimize their query for Duck Duck Go. I've been using it as a default for some months now, but I often fall back to Google for software error message strings and other things.

supermatou• 13 years ago

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for keeping my private stuff - well, private. But, really, will this matter? I mean, how many people used Gnome's browser in the first place? and how many people, after trying DDG won't simply switch back to Google?

Had Gnome's browser been no.1 or no.2 in the browser arena, the gesture may have had some impact (albeit just symbollicaly). But right now... do they think Google would even care/notice?

knappe• 13 years ago

Everything happens one step at a time.

jeena• 13 years ago

I think they are aware of what you're suggesting they wrote:

"Then again, knowing the humble size of our userbase, we should let neither our expectations nor our imagination run wild on this front."

Still it is the first browser which chooses DDG as its default search engine that I am aware of. This is quite a thing for such a small company like DDG. Now others can follow (or not) when they see that it worked (or not) for Gnome. And even if on Linux more people are aware of the fact that they can change their search engine in the browser, still there is a fair amount who just use what is there. It is therefore browsers nowadays are developed, do sell the default search engine position.

I remember the days when IE had 98% of the market share.

khill• 13 years ago

I remember the days when Netscape Navigator had all the market share.

Get off my lawn. :)

ewzimm2• 13 years ago

Trisquel's abrowser also uses ddg as the default. Ddg contributes to the project

nsmartt2• 13 years ago

Midori (the elementary OS browser) offers several default options for search, including DDG.

teaneedz5• 13 years ago

The gesture is noteworthy not because of market share but because of who the user base is. It's exciting to see folks in the technology field (often the same ones who were educating others about Google in the early days) promoting DDG now. A browser that ships with DDG as its default, adds immediate cred to its brand image, IMO.

Sometimes we need to be the ones willing to sacrifice a little bit of "convenience" to stand up for products and services that are at least attempting to travel a better road for users. Maybe I'm being a bit naive, but I believe that lines are being drawn and those products on the side of users, have a renewed opportunity to shine.

DDG is right there - in a great position. I get the results I want from DuckDuckGo without bloat and "personalized" crud. If I really want to massage the DDG query results, I can add !sp and get a "Google" perspective with privacy.

The !bang syntax just makes DDG more powerful.

All in all, I think that Gnome's decision is more than just a gesture. It's the beginning of a shift and the big players can either read the message that's being sent or ignore it to their data loss.

Aldo_MX• 13 years ago

Kudos to DDG :)

anxiousest• 13 years ago

I have nothing against the entities involved but reading the comments here I get the impression that many simply ignored the "cooperation" bit i.e:

Cooperation: It's been some time now since we were first contacted by DuckDuckGo regarding the possibility to partner with them in order to share a percentage of the revenue that they make from the traffic originated on their search engine links ...

So DDG made a deal they could afford and got their partner to hold water for them and link to one of their PR websites, they've been ramping up their marketing efforts to try and capitalize on certain fears, which I suppose is logical.

Generally speaking I think ddg went with the "we don't store data" route because it's the niche they were left with and that ultimately means their search won't improve beyond a certain point.

andyroid• 13 years ago

"Generally speaking I think ddg went with the "we don't store data" route because it's the niche they were left with and that ultimately means that their search won't improve beyond a certain point."

As they will all be too busy not storing peoples data, or how does this line of reasoning work?

s3r3nity• 13 years ago

Search is based upon machine learning algorithms that use stored data as signals. Google is not only REALLY good at what they do BECAUSE of the amount of data they have on the individual doing the searching, but the benefits of machine learning are that they will get even BETTER as more and more data is incorporated and stored.

Without proper machine learning on the individual level, DDG will never improve beyond a point. They're already kind of shitty, and even if they get millions of more queries they won't be able to improve at the rate that Google does.

It's a trade-off ('privacy' vs. 'quality') that 95% of the world doesn't give a shit about. Therefore I see this sort of move to DDG as just short-sighted and unreasonable overall.

natrius• 13 years ago

User data is commonly used to improve relevance.

tomku• 13 years ago

You can only make your results so relevant if you limit yourself to returning the same results for everyone for a given query. Google uses its data on you to (among other things) tweak your search results based on what it thinks you specifically are likely to be looking for, which DDG will never be able to do.

DDG has (rather successfully) spun that as a critical feature rather than the tradeoff between privacy and utility that it is.

nsmartt2• 13 years ago

Why would storing personal information be necessary (not beneficial) to improve a service? There are plenty of ways to improve user experience, including actually communicating with users.

cinquemb• 13 years ago

Generally speaking I think ddg went with the "we don't store data" route because it's the niche they were left with and that ultimately means that their search won't improve beyond a certain point.

I'd have to agree with this sentiment. After using ddg for about two years, I was kind of expecting something more to come from the whole zero click thing that could change the way users interact with search and how websites and information is discovered (like a different take on SEO).

Now they could totally ride (and should) the "we don't store data" wave, but I wonder how far the ddg team thinks it will take them and does the general population of people equate that to being a better search engine?

milesf• 13 years ago

I've switched from Google and Chrome to DDG and Firefox. Very happy with the switch. I've started recommending to my non-techie relatives to switch as well.

We've seen this sort of thing before. I've gone from no search engines, to Webcrawler, to Lycos, to AltaVista, to Google, and now DuckDuckGo. No biggie.

teaneedz5• 13 years ago

I've made the exact same switch. I'm loving the combination of FF & DDG. I've also set DDG as the default search engine in Chrome and use it on iOS from the app and Mercury browser. DuckDuckGo deserves all the great publicity it's receiving.

ams61102• 13 years ago

DDG is my default search engine, I do find myself needing to occasionally throw in !g if I'm not finding what I'm looking for. Results are generally decent though, and the trend seems to be that they are getting better and better (though I have not objectively measured that in any way). The other ! shortcuts are worth reviewing, as they can dramatically improve the results if you're doing a focused search.

bsullivan013• 13 years ago

Same here, FF and DDG. Might have to use Bing or Google a few times but Google isn't /wasn't perfect on every search either.

I now do get referrals from DDG on a few on my websites so anecdotally and from a very small sample I see the increase. Google has become very commercialized and too tied up with the FED big boys now.

fetbaffe3• 13 years ago

Firefox must make it easier to switch the default Google search engine for the address bar.

kbart• 13 years ago

It's really easy, only few mouse clicks, doesn't even require to restart Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-fo...

Svip• 13 years ago

They've changed the behaviour of that in the address bar now. Perhaps I have done something wrong, but it appears that what you type in the address bar searches by the search bar's choice. So if I have Wikipedia selected, it searches on Wikipedia from the address bar. This behaviour was initially very confusing.

At first I thought I had done something strange to my Firefox (on Linux), but then I noticed both on my workstation (Windows) at work, and on my laptop (Linux and Windows). I hope someone else can confirm this.

weslly• 13 years ago

Same here, both Firefox and DDG improved a lot in the last couple of years. I don't think I'll switch back to Chrome + Google again.

benbristow• 13 years ago

DuckDuckGo is great. I always end up after a while using Google though as I find Google generally has better results and I enjoy the 'sort in the last...' functions for example that DDG lacks.

burmask• 13 years ago

Gnome is not a popular browser, but every little bit matters.

yeukhon2• 13 years ago

This is stupid. Someone downvoted you just because you called it not a popular browser. Man. HN is becoming shit.

brokenparser3• 13 years ago

It's more likely because Gnome != a web browser.

jlgreco• 13 years ago

Why the hell does Gnome even have a webbrowser? Projects that are dedicated to working on webbrowsers fuck it up often enough...

Whatever, good for them I guess. I wonder if would have noticed if not for this article.

qq66• 13 years ago

A built-in browser is the best way to download the browser of your choice.

BCM43• 13 years ago

No, the package management system on just about every distribution running gnome is the best way. A web browser is a good way to get info on why the package manage is broken though.

tuananh• 13 years ago

You're talking about IE6, amirite?

aestra• 13 years ago

KDE has a web browser too, Konqueror which uses KHTML and KJS which then Apple forked into Webkit to use in Safari. Google then got into the Webkit action with Chrome. Now Google is forking Webkit itself.

So yes, nothing good ever comes out of rarely used web browsers.

magicalist2• 13 years ago

The Web browser is WebKit via WebKitGTK+ (the reference is a little oblique, but it's mentioned in the article, or you could do a basic search), so no need to fret over other people working on a browser you don't even use.

brokenparser3• 13 years ago

Because Web adheres to the human interface guidelines.

unclebucknasty• 13 years ago

I immediately feel "freer" just reading this.

I have heard of DDG intermittently, but never remember to try it out with any consistency. I generally have my default browser page set to about:blank, but I just updated it to DDG. Maybe that will prompt me to try it for a while.

But, here's the thing: As an avid Android user (phones and tablets), it feels a little "insufficient" to just switch over my search engine in the name of privacy. After all, I use the big G for nav, contacts, and other stuff. Of course, it is easy to use their sevices by default, and I don't know what a viable alternative stack woukd look like. I disabled Verizon's Navigator because its click agreement seemed at least as onerous as what I have seen from G.

So, even in trying to find alternatives, it does bring up the questions: to whom am I willing to provide my info, how much am I willing to provide, and in exchange for what?

Derbasti• 13 years ago

It is relatively easy to run your own contacts/calendar server. Just buy a Raspberry Pi, set up DynDNS, and hit apt-get install owncloud. This is really the way to go here.

Also, there are plenty of email providers out there that are not Google (but it is often unclear whether they are any better privacy-wise. Also, arguably, no one is providing as slick a web interface for email as Google). I am not living in the US, so it makes sense for me to choose an email provider in my own country.

Mapping is more difficult. Tomtom etc. have great navigation apps. But if you just want to look at a map, GMaps is still far superior to most OSM based map apps. Skobbler has a few great ones.

bad_user• 13 years ago

Depends on where you live. In my city and its surroundings, OSM data is far better than GMaps. And on my Android I paid for both OsmAnd and Skobbler. These aren't as polished as Gmaps, but at least they work offline.

eloff• 13 years ago

This is trading imagined harm for a real harm. You trade off a loss of privacy that has zero practical implications currently for almost everyone (a few terrorist suspects might have to worry) against lost time due to inferior search result quality.

I don't follow the logic. It seems like idealism for the sake of idealism to me.

thrownaway24243• 13 years ago

Worse than that. It's trading a known bad thing (DDG's worse search results quality) for an imaginary privacy benefit.

fhd24• 13 years ago

This is trading imagined harm for a real harm. You trade off a loss of privacy that has zero practical implications currently for almost everyone (a few terrorist suspects might have to worry) against lost time due to inferior search result quality.

So you argue that slightly inferior search results are "real harm" and mass surveillance is "imagined harm"? I'm afraid we don't agree on the definition of the word "harm".

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, eh?

superuser22• 13 years ago

Mass surveillance is watching everything and fishing for illegal activity. That is not the same as filing subpoenas for data on persons of interest.

If you think everything that generates records the government can eventually access is "real harm," what exactly are you doing on HN?

cromwellian• 13 years ago

The filter bubble thing is overstated. There are times when you want a filter bubble, when you found a piece of information and want to dig deeper on related subjects, a "conversational" interface that has at least short term memory offers big benefits. Do you really want to ask questions to an entity which acts like it has anterograde amnesia? Can you imagine Captain Picard having to continue to remind the computer of the enterprise about context?

Google's 'long term memory' offers lots of benefits too, and 90% of the time, the filter bubble is the correct answer. Like when I search for a particular business on the desktop, and then later I search on my mobile device in Google Maps, and the very first auto-suggest after typing 1-2 characters it the business I searched for yesterday. This is awesome given how irritating it is to enter stuff on mobile devices, especially when in motion, the fewer characters typed the better.

Most of the privacy issues can be solved just by opening up an incognito window. You can choose with 1 stroke whether you want a bubble or not.

fetbaffe3• 13 years ago

Captain Picard definitely lives in a filter bubble. So many times he has been fooled by the bad guy is just embarrassing.

teaneedz5• 13 years ago

Personally, I prefer this: [DuckDuckGo Privacy](https://duckduckgo.com/privacy)

To this: [Incognito mode (browse in private) - Chrome Help](https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95464?hl=en)

Sometimes it's better to pay the price of a few extra characters to retain some control.

coob• 13 years ago

http://ddg.gg <- fewer chars

fatjokes• 13 years ago

Personally, I prefer this: [DuckDuckGo Privacy](https://duckduckgo.com/privacy)

Ahh, but if the NSA got a secret court order commanding DDG to start collecting data quietly, would users know? Do you think DDG would go the way of Lavabit and shut down voluntarily?

bsullivan013• 13 years ago

"Google's 'long term memory' offers lots of benefits too"

Especially to NSA and local police. NSA can't store everything forever so Google chips in.

Are you a Google employee by any chance? If so, your tune would change if Apple was doing it and Google wasn't.

mortehu• 13 years ago

Needs more accusations of ill intent.

taproot2• 13 years ago

Apple does do it? How do you think siri works?

taproot2• 13 years ago

I really think we need a search command to break out of the bubble on google, you are right 90% of the time its the right choice but the other 10 your screwed, some trial and error with removing the offending terms but sometimes it just doesnt.

imurray2• 13 years ago

https://startpage.com/ gives you Google search results minus personalization.

barrkel• 13 years ago

The privacy issue I have is that governments can come in and request all data companies have about me, and there is nothing companies can do about this. There is no privacy promise they can make to me that can withstand a government request.

The only defence is to ensure the data does not exist.

In practice, this means using an incognito window almost all the time. Simply the fact that I'm on the other end of an IP logged in to a service is information I'd rather not share. And that's just too onerous, so instead I ensure my main browser isn't logged in to any services, amongst other defensive measures.

marbu• 13 years ago

Exactly, the bubble it's not bad in all use cases. Nevertheless it would be really great if you actually have a real control over it: switching from one "bubble" to another for different contexts or disabling it altogether.

Kiro• 13 years ago

Time to stop using the Gnome browser then.

DigitalSea• 13 years ago

I think the NSA have proven if a particular data provider (in this case Google) doesn't agree or can't provide the info the NSA wants, the NSA have the capabilities to sniff the traffic on a multitude of levels. Privacy is an illusion, but I can attest to the fact DuckDuckGo is the more secure option.

ok_craig• 13 years ago

...how?

ubojan• 13 years ago

This might be workable for some people, I tried DDG and results aren't on the same level. DDG is getting better every day, until then my temporary solution is using "Google proxy" (anonymised Google search) like https://startpage.com/.

fedvasu2• 13 years ago

DuckDuckGo is nothing but a bing front-end. I do not see an upside with this switch, so basically, you are making M$ more stronger on Web. I am not being snarky, I am concerned.Google is evil sure, but is M$ better?

fedvasu2• 13 years ago

No seriously, tell me[with citation] that it is not bing front-end. I am all for it.

rickr• 13 years ago

I think they may have gotten their data from bing in the past but these days it looks like that isn't the case.

https://dukgo.com/help/en_US/results/sources

icantthinkofone• 13 years ago

Bad move. It creates an extra step in the installation process. It forces users to then reset it back to Google search, which most everyone will do. Just like when you reset Bing in IE to Google.

Gnome's Web Browser Ditches Google For DuckDuckGo

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