DuckDuckGo - Is Google Playing Fair? 178
Penurious Penguin writes "Privacy-oriented search-engine and Google-rival DuckDuckGo is contending possible anti-competitiveness on the part of Google. MIT graduate and founder of DuckDuckGo Gabriel Weinberg cites several examples; his company's disadvantages in the Android mobile OS; and browsers, which in Firefox requires only a single step to set DuckDuckGo as the default search — while doing so in Chrome requires five. Weinberg also questions the domain duck.com, which he offered to purchase before it was acquired by Google. His offer was declined and duck.com now directs to Google's homepage.
Weinberg isn't the first to make similar claims; there was scroogle.org, which earlier this year, permanently shut down after repeated compatibility issues with Google's algorithms. Whatever the legitimacy of these claims, there certainly seems a growing market for people interested in privacy and objective searches — avoiding profiled search-results, a.k.a. 'filter bubbles.'"
Nobody plays fair (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nobody plays fair (Score:4, Interesting)
which is why DuckDuckGo, a so called "privacy oriented browser", uses bing for it's underlying searches. Any time you hear "anticompetitive search", it's 100% microsoft/fairsearch funded. It's not even remotely about privacy or security as a result of that. Anyone who believes duckduckgo is about your privacy when bing has your information, is misinformed.
if you wanted privacy in your search, use a multi-search engine and get real results the way you want. It's that simple, and they do exist. To act like people are somehow " at a loss" when they can go to any website they want to search is to fail to acknowledge that bing is a horrible search engine.
TLDR: anti-google (and pro-microsoft) article.
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I will agree with the summary that making DDG the default search in Chrome/Chromium is not straightforward. Picking anything other than the 3 choices given (Google, Bing, Yahoo) takes a bit of work.
In FF and Opera it's quite easy to add new searches, even for other sorts of sites like the Arch Linux Wiki.
Re:Nobody plays fair (Score:4, Informative)
Adding a search engine isn't "one click", you need to go to "manage search engines", scroll to the bottom, click "get more search engines", search for one, click "add to firefox", "allow", and then select it from the search menu. The effort in Chrome is roughly the same.
This is a fraudulent, astroturfed complaint.
Meanwhile inOpera... (Score:4, Informative)
Right-click the search entry field, select "Create search", enter keyword in the pop-up, Done.
(check the checkboxes in the pop-up if you want to make default (else it just add it into your list))
To search a word, just select it and right click, it offers to search both the default or select from your entire list.
Yet another reason why Opera is awesome :D
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Aside from searching through all searches, this is the same process as Chrome.
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Adding a search engine isn't "one click", you need to go to "manage search engines", scroll to the bottom, click "get more search engines", search for one, click "add to firefox", "allow", and then select it from the search menu. The effort in Chrome is roughly the same.
This is a fraudulent, astroturfed complaint.
FUD; I can add a search engine to Firefox much quicker than that:
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In Chrome this is:
Click search box
right click> "Add as search..."
OK
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Re:Nobody plays fair (Score:5, Informative)
No, when you are on www.duckduckgo.com, you show the list of search engines by clicking the small arrow, you see "Add DuckDuckGo" at the bottom, you click it and you are done. Admittedly, that's two clicks.
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In Chrome when you're are on wwww.duckduckgo.com Right click the status bar, click "Edit Search Engines" and click "make default" next to duckduckgo.com.
Three clicks. Four if you count having to hit ok.
This is a non-story.
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More importantly, who cares how many fucking steps it has, as long as they are simple? It's like measuring ease of installation in clicks - a useless, meaningless metric. Shit, Chrome is the easiest there is to configure, because intead of presenting you with a list, it lets you easily modify the search URL. If you invent your own search engine today, you can simply paste its search URL there and it'll work. Absolutely NO barrier at all. Have you ever clicked "get more search engines" in Firefox? It sends y
Re:Nobody plays fair (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Nobody plays fair (Score:5, Informative)
which is why DuckDuckGo, a so called "privacy oriented browser", uses bing for it's underlying searches. Any time you hear "anticompetitive search", it's 100% microsoft/fairsearch funded. It's not even remotely about privacy or security as a result of that. Anyone who believes duckduckgo is about your privacy when bing has your information, is misinformed.
Are you sure you're understanding how the site works?
Standard searches made via DuckDuckGo will not result in you personally being tracked by the underlying search engines. This is because your client isn't making direct contact with the underlying search engines - DuckDuckGo is collating the results together and presenting them. In that context, what you're saying is that buying a can of Heinz Beans from a supermarket results in Heinz tracking me - even though I have no direct contact with them (and assuming the supermarket isn't passing on personally identifying purchaser information to Heinz).
There's no Bing/Google tracking happening here:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=test%20search [duckduckgo.com]
Using a bang (such as !bing or !image) is where tracking can kick in because at that point you're most likely hitting a source site. This is comparable to ordering beans directly from Heinz.
This link would result in tracking from bing:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!bing+test+search [duckduckgo.com]
DuckDuckGo is a multi-search engine. You're only making contact with the underlying search providers when you choose to, and at that point it's pretty clear because you're seeing a Google/Bing page.
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Re:Nobody plays fair (Score:5, Informative)
DuckDuckGo has made a whole host of guarantees [duckduckgo.com] that they will never track you, collect personal info, etc. They've built their entire brand around these guarantees. (Their billboard slogan is "Google tracks you. We don't.") You don't have to simply trust their goodwill; their self-interest will enforce this too. If they broke their guarantees, their company would lose its reputation very quickly, their brand would soon be worthless, and they'd likely be vulnerable to a host of lawsuits.
Google, on the other hand, freely admits that they do collect and use such information [google.com]. You have to read the fine print and look around to get a better idea about how they plan to use that info, and they won't tell you at all about the unintended ways this info gets used (here's DuckDuckGo's page about that [donttrack.us]).
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Except they made these promises THROUGH Bing.
Do you not understand how that works? It's called astroturfing. Microsoft also admits they track. The difference is Microsoft doesn't offer you tools to opt out or export your information.
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Bunk. Bing is just one of DDG's search providers. When you search from DDG and it uses Bing's API to provide some of its results, the only information Bing gets is a query text, sent from DDG's servers. Nothing about your ip/location, user agent, cookies, search history, or anything else gets transmitted to Bing's servers.
Even if you assume Bing is maximally evil, there's awfully little they can do to personally identify you out of a stream of millions of totally anonymous query texts being sent from DDG's
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If you're a scripter it kind of makes sense. Many scripting languages on *nix-type systems have the first line of their script something like this:
#!/usr/bin/env sh
The sharp tells the interpreter to ignore the code (not necessary for a search engine), but the bang tells the environment to "execute this list of commands with the following interpreter". When you use a bang (!) in ddg, you're telling it to "send this list of search terms to the following interpreter"; however, the interpreter is not bour
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But still, bing can give back a set of links that contain additional information about the search (made by DDG).
When you click on one of those links, the website to which you are directed then knows about your search, and then the website can bubble you.
Re:Nobody plays fair (Score:5, Informative)
Duckduckgo isn't a browser, it's a search engine. It doesn't just use Bing. It pulls from over 50 different sources for search results
From http://www.pcworld.com/article/245129/are_duckduckgos_bing_ties_a_problem_for_linux_mint_.html [pcworld.com]
Bing doesn't get your information. Duckduckgo is an intermediary in the process and duckduckgo doesn't store your information.
It's time to take off that tinfoil hat and start wrapping the house instead.
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I fail to see how you can claim this a pro-microsoft ant-google article since DDG uses results from a lot more sources than Bing. From the DDG FAQ:
http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-sources
Sources
Last Updated: Nov 05, 2012 02:47PM EST
DuckDuckGo gets its results from over 50 sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (in our own index), Yahoo! (through BOSS),
embed.ly, WolframAlpha, EntireWeb, Bing, Yandex, and Blekko. For any given search, there is usually a
Mod parent down for misinfo. DDG uses google (Score:2)
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DDG uses Bing, Google, and other search engines. It's an aggregator. DDG is not some evil plot by Microsoft designed to somehow make Google look bad.
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Please feel free to provide evidence of your claim.
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For a website you're claiming is pro Microsoft is seems odd that Google is their first alternative search choice when they don't find what you want.
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which is why DuckDuckGo, a so called "privacy oriented browser", uses bing for it's underlying searches. Any time you hear "anticompetitive search", it's 100% microsoft/fairsearch funded. It's not even remotely about privacy or security as a result of that. Anyone who believes duckduckgo is about your privacy when bing has your information, is misinformed.
if you wanted privacy in your search, use a multi-search engine and get real results the way you want. It's that simple, and they do exist. To act like people are somehow " at a loss" when they can go to any website they want to search is to fail to acknowledge that bing is a horrible search engine.
TLDR: anti-google (and pro-microsoft) article.
Right, so even though this is a blindly ignorant comment, it gets a score of 5, Interesting because it's anti-Microsoft? DDG isn't a browser, it's a search engine. It doesn't solely use Bing for its searches. It uses a variety of search engines, amongst them Yahoo and WolframAlpha, to generate its results. It's in no way funded by Microsoft, it's not affiliated with FairSearch and information does not get passed from DDG to Microsoft. DDG works as an intermediary and keeps no personal data.
And that's the
Tax Evasion (Score:2)
It's all about numbers, shares, dollars and control of data.
Don't forget technically legal (for the moment) tax evasion [slashdot.org]. I suppose that might be covered by dollars although expecting others to pay for the public infrastructure you us is hardly fair and could well be considered somewhat evil.
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Since we're talking about numbers:
in Firefox requires only a single step to set DuckDuckGo as the default search — while doing so in Chrome requires five
This claim from DDG is too fucking stupid to be taken seriously by anyone. It takes people one less character to type my brother's email address than mine, therefore my brother is taking advantage of this name and isn't playing fair.
True, it's not one step. But it is as few as three (two if the site's already open) (as in my post above) [slashdot.org].
Growing market (Score:1)
Whatever the legitimacy of these claims, there certainly seems a growing market for people interested in privacy and objective searches — avoiding profiled search-results, a.k.a. 'filter bubbles.
Well it could be true that there's a growing market, and you'll definitely find people on Slashdot who are part of that market, but could we have some stats? Why does it "certainly" seem that the market is growing?
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Well it could be true that there's a growing market, and you'll definitely find people on Slashdot who are part of that market, but could we have some stats? Why does it "certainly" seem that the market is growing?
Anecdotal evidence: Privacy search plugins like Google Sharing [mozilla.org] appear to have fast growing userbase/# of reviews etc, many more each time I upgrade and check them anyway.
I call bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
DuckDuckGo can sod off, in my opinion. My one experience with DDG results from their inclusion as the default search engine in Linux Mint. 1) Their search results are crap. 2) Trying to replace them with Google as the default search provider was CRAZY DIFFICULT. I don't want to hear about how hard it is to change default search providers to DDG, because changing back was a non-trivial task for me.
There is a market for a not-Google. Just like there is a market for a not-Facebook. But just like recent U.S. elections proved, being a "not-something" is not necessarily enough to gain market share. You have to be better, or at least perceived as being better. DDG is not, at least not in my experience, and whining in public is certainly not helping.
cej102937
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DuckDuckGo can sod off, in my opinion. My one experience with DDG results from their inclusion as the default search engine in Linux Mint. 1) Their search results are crap. 2) Trying to replace them with Google as the default search provider was CRAZY DIFFICULT. I don't want to hear about how hard it is to change default search providers to DDG, because changing back was a non-trivial task for me.
And how is it DDG's responsibility how Mint is configured? DDG makes a search site and nothing more. They don't develop a web browser or an operating system.
Go and bitch at Mint if configuring it is difficult but this story is not about Mint.
From DDG it's totally easy to search via Google: Either select Google from the drop-down menu or add !g in the search field.
The quality of every developed search engine obviously varies over time.
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Dont spread misinformation. I have been using duck duck go since mid summer and I find it just as reliable as google was back in the day, before they started adding all the useless crap. I had been looking for a google alternative for years, tried bing and all that, but they all sucked ass. Duck duck go is more like what google once was. Their mapquest integration might not be the best (or mapquest just sucks), so i still do use maps.google.com on occasion, but I was actually surprised how well DDG works.
Fo
Re:I call bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
Goofy naming doesn't seem to prevent a product or service from getting popular, witness Wii and iPad. I think DDG is a better name than those of web services that add or drop vowels.
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DuckDuckGo is 3 syllables, composed of already existing words, and doesn't really stand out in a positive way.
On the other hand, the parody title for a porn search engine practically writes itself. You can't say that about "Google" or "Bing".
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How about DuckDuckGoose?
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I use a search called LlamaLlamaLlamaLlamaDingDong.
It finds everything for me. LlamaLlamaLlamaLlamaDingDong.
It gets me stuff for free. For it's mine, all mine.
Oh, oh, oh, oh.
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Probably coming from an AC that types slashdot.org in the search bar of Google and then clicks on the first link.
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the domain name story seems like a stretch (Score:5, Interesting)
What seems more likely:
1) He offered to buy duck.com from On2 Technologies (which was originally named The Duck Corporation), but they held out for more than he was willing to offer. It's an obviously valuable domain name so this doesn't require some kind of secret agreement with Google: maybe they just thought they could get more than he was offering for it.
2) Sometime later, Google bought On2 for their codec (VP8, on which WebM was based). Of course this means they got all their other assets too, like their old domain name. Typical Google practice is to redirect acquired domain names to google.com, or to a specific product page on google.com if relevant. Considering that Google is very interested in codecs, it seems rather unlikely that Google really bought On2 for the domain name.
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Jeez imagine Google redirecting a domain to google.com. Conspiracy!
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Lets test the Doppler shift (Score:1)
As the Whambulance drives past. P.S.: The win goes to the first poster who says that this is really Bing's fault for some undefined reason involving hatred of microsoft.
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No, its Altavista's fault.
duck.com (Score:4, Insightful)
Information is money (Score:2)
and everyone wants it.
Privacy is the Anti-Google (Score:2)
So you know. I use Google exclusively for my searches and I use Android for my phones and tablets. It might appear I'm just a big fat Google fanboy. I'm not. I know Google for what it is and I trust it only to that extent.
It disturbs me that Google would seek to interfere with other businesses. Privacy is a concern for many people and while I don't live in privacy paranoia land, I want to keep the border open so I can visit from time to time.
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I think you'll find that in this case, it's not interfering in businesses, and this is just more ant-Google FUD. There is an extraordinary amount of it around lately.
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Yes... perhaps... this time. The facts of every case needs to be objectively judged every time. We should try not to let reputation (good or bad) influence us into prejudging too much.
It is in Google's interest to not allow competitors use its resources. For example, a privacy oriented search service should not be allowed to benefit from Google's resources by it essentially being a proxy service for search. (Grey area there, because what if this privacy oriented service actually *IS* a proxy service? I
This free thing I got isn't good enough... (Score:5, Insightful)
Some time back in Britain, a bank marketing genius decided that the way to get new customers was to get rid of the old charging model and offer "free" banking. It was such a brilliant wheeze that all the other banks had to follow suit. However, in order to make a profit, banks were then obliged to slap on a whole new range of exceptional and penal charges in the small print and to give their customers the hard sell for a bunch of other financial products that they didn't need (and for which the banks are now paying billions of pounds in compensation). Everyone is agreed that "free" banking is broken, but nobody can be the first to reinstate charges because their customers will all take a hike.
Search engines are the same. Having "free" search engines is a really crazy idea if you think the end user should have some interest in how the results should be selected and presented. But nobody is ever going to pay to use a search engine while the other(s) is/are still free, even if the results are worse.
So we're stuck with a model in which the selection and presentation of results must of commercial necessity be orchestrated for profit and the more people who see those results the more profit is made.
You can argue about the extent to which the orchestration is fair and transparent - and indeed whether fairness and transparency are adequate counterweights - but as long as someone else is paying the conductor you get no say in the performance.
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Free banking in the UK isn't broken. What's broken is the bank's attitudes. Rather than just being happy making a good profit from interest payments and the investment of people's savings they want to make massive profits. Because free banking is the norm they do this mainly by raping you with charges. To the point that going overdrawn just once can, for some people, lead to a viscous circle of debt they cannot pull out of. They would STILL do this if banking wasn't free. Anyone who thinks this kind of thin
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However, in order to make a profit, banks were then obliged to slap on a whole new range of exceptional and penal charges in the small print and to give their customers the hard sell for a bunch of other financial products that they didn't need
Or they could just make money from the difference between what they pay you when you lend them your money and what you pay them when they lend you other poeple's money.
So we're stuck with a model in which the selection and presentation of results must of commercial necessity be orchestrated for profit
As far as I know, web search engines have been free to use as long as there have been web search engines. The most lauded search engines are those that present the results that the user is most interested in at or near the top of the results. If they do a good job of this, many people will use the search engine, and it becomes sort of the sta
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Anyhow, that all changed when Canadian banks loaned a truckload of money to some Central American countries that went broke and defaulted on the loans. Rather than see their shareholders suffer for the bad decisions, user charges started
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Companies can't have their cake and eat it, too. If the search engines want to start charging *us*, then we need to start charging *them* for collecting the trillions of web pages that they collect. It w
How interested? (Score:2)
How much are they willing to pay?
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How much does google make out of the ads it shows me and I completely ignore because they're totally irrelevant?
I wouldn't mind paying that much to DDG, and I don't think many other mind sparing a few cents a month either.
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The ads have to be relevant to some, and not all, people for google to make money out of you. Google is not interested in individuals, they are interested in having eyeballs of which they converts a small proportion into clicks on the ads.
Use more than one? (Score:2)
As others have pointed out it's very easy to change the default search engine in Chrome. Naturally Google is going to have their own search engine as the default. They are giving us the browser for free and want to make some revenue from their search results. To maintain privacy in searches here is what I do:
1) Change the default search engine to DDG.
2) I use a desktop email client rather than the web client for Gmail. Why? Because as soon as you log into your Google account they start tracking your movemen
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Thanks for the tips. I don't use Facebook, Twitter or Bing and when I use LinkedIn it's only for a quick check and then I log off. One other thing I forgot to mention was that I went into my Google profile and turned off web search history. Javascript is disabled and only enabled for sites that I choose and trust. Cookies get tossed every time I close the browser and I don't accept any from 3rd parties. Without going full tinfoil-hat mode that's about as safe as I can get it :-)
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Holy conspiracy theories, batman! (Score:3)
Duck.com was not specifically purchased to be anticompetetive. It was owned previously by On2, who used to be known as The Duck Corporation. Google purchased On2 for its V8 video codec to create WebM.
Unless someone is seriously going to stipulate the creation and push towards WebM was a deep seeded plot to mess with DuckDuckGo, this theory has no leg to stand on.
There's something I don't get... (Score:4, Interesting)
These sites are using Google's (and Bing's and others') results, collating them and presenting them to the users. Why exactly do they expect Google would play fair with that? It's not like Google specifically provides a service for third parties to reuse their search results. They're setting up an additional, unsupported layer between users and Google, and thus shouldn't be surprised that said layer requires frequent changes to work. Google won't stop and ask "we want to change this, that fine by you?" when they see no profit, no advantage from it.
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DuckDuckGo doesn't re-use Google's search results (unless that's changed recentlly). They started as an anonymizing front-end for Bing, but now use many non-google search sites, plus their own crawler.
Noting you wrote has anything to do with the topic at hand. No one is complaiing it's hard to repackage Google search results. Chrome makes it needlessly hard to leave the Google mothership for search, which is anti-competitive.
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Chrome makes it needlessly hard to leave the Google mothership for search
Chrome makes it very easy to "leave the Google mothership" for search. When you install it, it prompts you to pick a search engine. And you can trivially switch search engines at any time from the settings.
Now, DDG isn't one of the initial search engine options, that's true. I don't think that's because Google hates DDG, but because DDG isn't a very popular search engine. Bing and Yahoo are clearly much more widely-used, so they're offered. The argument that DDG is hard to set as the default engine i
You can blame me for duck.com. (Score:5, Interesting)
I started working at The Duck Corporation (duck.com) in 1996, a few years before it went public as On2 Technologies/The Duck Corporation (on2.com and duck.com), and was working with Google/Duck/On2 until a year and a few months after the acquisition in 2010. At Duck/On2, I was responsibile for everything related to building our networks and maintaining all the hardware, software, servers, domains, networks and a ton of other stuff, you know the typical system administrator job.
Prior to the acquisition, but after going public as On2, we likely didn't sell duck.com because that was still my primary email address and I and a few others still actively used it, and we still kept up a basic website for information about our old and basically no longer supported software; and it was just one of those things still tied to the company with a lot of history as The Duck Corporation, so we decided to keep it. Feel free to blame me, since I always requested that we keep it when we saw the many offers for the domain over the years, mostly in the hundreds to couple of thousand dollar range; and because of my history with the company, I am sure I was a big part of that decision to not sell it.
When Google bought us, I knew I was still going to be there for a while to make sure all our company data, and some specific services that had to stay up, was migrated into their servers. Since we hosted all our own servers with our own hardware and software and they had to ulimately be shut down, I had to get things moved over and still needed to get my duck.com email.
So at that point, since I was still getting a lot of duck.com emails and had my duck.com email address for literally many hundreds of websites, publications, mailing lists, business contacts and other things, since I mainly used duck.com for well over a decade, I wanted to make sure Google's DNS and email was configured to still get duck.com emails. I actually had started trying to switch all my duck.com to google.com, but it was an overwhelming process. I still wonder how much email is still going to my duck.com email address.
I took it upon myself to learn the Google way of configuring their public DNS, email and a bunch of other things because I was nosey and wanted to learn and did learn some really cool and interesting stuff about them while I was there. I made sure the MX record for duck.com was still configured to deliver my email (and a few other email addresses) to my Google email account. Since it was decided to no longer keep the website up, I can't give you a real explanation, but I ended up configuring duck.com websites to point to the google.com main page instead of nothing. So you can go ahead and blame me, but no one at Google specifically told me to point duck.com to their site.
Re:You can blame me for duck.com. (Score:5, Insightful)
And this kind of comment is why I still read Slashdot.
Thanks for the explanation!
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I think they should hand over the domain name to me now. For obvious reasons.
Already happening (Score:3)
FTC is already investigating Google for anti-competitive practice, but not on this front.
They are more concerned about organic results being squeezed out in favor of Google properties. Instead of being redirected to natural results, half the first page results are taken up by ads and Google shopping properties. FTC is not keen on this, and they will supposedly sue if they don't get an acceptable agreement in place.
Duck.com (Score:2)
The duck.com thing seems untoward to me.
Android as a Google-centric OS... yeah, that's true, but it's their fricking OS so it's hard to blame them.
Bullshit, FUD (Score:2)
Maybe that's a problem, but so is... (Score:2)
The fact that DDG just isn't ready for prime time.
I love the idea, so much so that I made it my primary engine for the bar in Safari on my various machines (including PCs). But very simply, it didn't get the results I wanted. Too much spam. Lots of hits on pages that were Wiki scrapes, for instance.
I gave up and switched back to Google. Open to future tries, but it needs to improve a whole lot, IMHO.
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That sounds a lot like why I switched away from Google. The results just kept on getting worse and worse. Though what ultimately pushed me away from Google was their insistence of searching for the terms they thought I wanted to search for instead of what I actually searched for.
they need a new name (Score:2)
I'm not going to tell some to "duckduckgo" something.
Seriously stupid fucking name.
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Re:Well, I use duckduckgo (Score:5, Informative)
They didn't specifically purchase duck.com, though. They bought On2 Technologies, formerly known as The Duck Corporation, in order to acquire the VP8 codec, which became WebM, and got all the rest of On2's assets as part of the package. It seems unlikely that the real point of the purchase was to acquire duck.com, considering that VP8 is actually pretty important to them.
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That... would be better if were spelled out explicitly in the article or at least implicitly in the summary. Implicit in the article made it go right over my head this time.
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That... would be better if were spelled out explicitly in the article or at least implicitly in the summary.
But where would be the fun? Gone...
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This is why it is wise to withhold judgment until you can hear the other side's view.
No, that is why journalists should do their job properly and inform the public accurately and correctly. Lazy writing is to blame here.
Re:Well, I use duckduckgo (Score:4, Insightful)
Lazy writing is to blame here.
I'm sure the article authors were not just being lazy, but in fact knew all this perfectly well; and made a decision not to mention it since it contradicted the opinion they were trying to promote.
Re:Well, I use duckduckgo (Score:4, Interesting)
If you'd read the link inside post, you'd see that the citations were already there, and Google and DDG are both represented by quotes.
They're not lazy at all. Instead, the post was used to craft a reactive opinion based on only a few facts inside the referenced link so as to provoke a response. This is called: suckerbait, and many took it.
Should search engine choice be the same number of clicks? Perhaps. But what the article alludes to is that a preponderance of facts *appears* that Google is engaged in anti-competitive behavior. Whether that behavior is monopolistic or sufficiently injures the public so as to motivate FTC litigation is still unknown.
Is DDG crying empty tears? I think they have some legitimate beefs with Google. I believe that Google is anti-competitive, but I don't know whether they're sufficiently anti-competitive so as to necessitate action to control that behavior. A good fight is a good fight until someone's fighting "dirty".
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I did the same thing, though mainly because I wanted out of the "search bubble" and was a bit worried about Google's tracking. In the end, I wound up going back to Google. Search results come up quicker, they tend to be of a little better quality, and one tool in particular is invaluable: the ability to specify a timeframe for the results.
Re:Well, I use duckduckgo (Score:5, Informative)
Since July 2, 1890. You shouldn't ask rhetorical questions that have actual answers.
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Except that when you realize DuckDuckGo is actually Bing in disguise, it regains the social stigma of using a Microsoft product. So you're back at square one.
Re:Oh well (Score:4, Informative)
It's not just Bing. They take results from a long list of engines, including their own crawler.
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Re:Not anticompetitive, just stupid name (Score:5, Insightful)
Because "Google" is so much better? "Yahoo!" was a great name? Get the fuck over yourself. Friggin prima donna