> It is necessary, but not sufficient
Doesn't DDG contradict that?
Doesn't DDG contradict that?
I use them anyway because they at least claim to be private and haven’t yet given me specific reason to doubt it. I probably should at some point take the time, though, to try to actually understand how they can viably exist in a way that isn’t going to succumb to the same corrupting incentives as google.
- build a useable search engine
- show ads to users
User acquisition is based on word of mouth and a bit of guerrilla marketing: they are a search engine with decent quality that doesn't spy on you.
Not spying and not selling tracking data to others cost them some opportunities but gives them "free" users that would otherwise have stayed with Google.
The last few years Google has been busily lowering their quality so even if DDG haven't improved much they feel very close to Google these days. (Also, retrying in Google takes 2 seconds from DDG, while retrying in DDG after trying in Google first takes 15 seconds and more thinking.)
I can be an early customer.
I don't have a problem with those ads, since they're not overly intrusive, they're clearly labeled, and they're not targeted to me based on my personal information. Plus, DDG actually gives me the option to disable ads completely.
That's what "don't be evil" should look like.
Note how their predecessor, Google, started out lovable and quirky but then that facade crumbled under the weight of success.
I like DDG, I use DDG, I recommend DDG. And I don't even care about the privacy. All that matters to me is my search habits, emails and business-related-data are controlled by different entities.
But at some point I expect the privacy aspect of DDG will be a memory rather than a current talking point. The incentives are pretty simple.
This is why it's important to have replacements around. Particularly smaller and newer businesses that aren't yet interested in squeezing out every drop from you.
> use them anyway because they at least claim to be private
Me too, at least there's probably some chance they get sued if they’re as terrible as Google. But
> haven’t yet given me specific reason to doubt it
I do doubt they’re as private as they could be, because they act a lot like I imagine a honeypot does, hide their source code, and have had serious past privacy problems in other products (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708166 ‘We’re not collecting your info, our servers are receiving it but just trust us we just throw it away’).
Right, in this context though it's referring to users themselves being tracked. Tracking how well the results to a specific query did doesn't require any sort of user-specific data. You're just logging stats about the results themselves, not the user.
Granted, OP didn't explicitly state they were discussing the most common behaviour in the market, but it remains a stretch to take them to be be stating a law that must be strictly true for any social construct that could be called a market.