duckduckgo VS smarter-encryption

As you can see here, DuckDuckHack is now archieved. Actually it seems DuckDuckGo's development is dying slowly.

Hey David, while we have no plans of shutting it down as we still use it ourselves, we also don't suggest relying on it since it hasn't been actively maintained for many years and doesn't have most of our answers, e.g., DuckDuckHack was put on maintenance mode about five years ago. We recently investigated this API's use and didn't find any significant usage, and so have removed the documentation to prevent further reliance.

And then nothing. I did a whois and that IP appears to belong to duckduckhack.com which also doesn't respond to a ping. What should I do to get DDG working on my network again?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/technology/duckduckgo-con...

5+ years ago, back when [0] people noticed that Nazi sites were the top Google results for "did the holocaust happen" — presumably because of the way Google prioritized literal text match in titles/headlines for esoteric queries — DDG had been providing bespoke responses via DuckDuckHack, its crowdsourced instant answer program [1]. Back then, and today, if you query a variation of "did the holocaust happen", the top result, in big large text, is "Yes"

DuckDuckHack was discontinued in 2017 because it didn't scale. The associated code repos are still available; for example, you can see how DDG's Instant Answer test suite specifically validated answers to questions about the Holocaust and the moon landing. [2]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/11/google...

[1] https://duckduckhack.com/

[2] https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/blob/mas...

I've been contributing to this project, it's a decentralized and open source search engine that is very community-driven. Presearch's Team and it's CEO are VERY transparent, conducting weekly updates on youtube. Their goal is to become non-profit as part of their roadmap, once their search engine becomes self-sustainable. It's growing very quickly and as i said, they recently started working on community packages so users can contribute (similar to what DuckDuckGo did with duckduckhack.com). Presearch will be fully decentralized by the end of this year, and they are also in the process of open sourcing the engine. So everything is more of work-in-progress. They are also in the middle of UI-redesign to make it look more modern.

> However, you do not need ublock origin here for privacy protection.

I'm happy to see DuckDuckGo entering this space and happy to see them building off of WebKit. And I think that DuckDuckGo is doing some fairly good stuff for privacy right now.

Nevertheless, this is a concerning comment. Ublock Origin isn't the only way to block ads of course and it's not impossible for something else to do better. But there is a reason it's widely considered the best adblocking browser extension right now, and it's not just hype or advertising.

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> Our tracker blocker is powered by our best-in-class Tracker Radar data set

The reason Ublock Origin is currently arguably the best-in-class adblocker for privacy protection is not because it does web crawling or because it uses a special data set, it's because of its capabilities.

DuckDuckGo using Tracker Radar data really has nothing to do with this conversation. It's possible DuckDuckGo's protections are sufficient on their own, but to make that determination you'd need to talk about the actual anti-circumvention features that it has, not just where it gets its data list from.

The comparison to Apple is particularly unfortunate, because Safari has easily the worst adblocking performance out of any major browser, so if they are using the Tracker Radar set to inform that, it's apparently not enough on its own to give them competitive adblocking performance.

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> Similarly our Smarter Encryption (HTTPS upgrading -- https://github.com/duckduckgo/smarter-encryption) is also based on regular web crawls and is many times more comprehensive then anything else out there.

This really shouldn't be in the same conversation, adblocking and connection upgrades are two separate factors of privacy. Both are important, but "we upgrade HTTPS" is kind of orthogonal to extension support.

However, since we're talking about HTTPS upgrading, bringing up that DuckDuckGo maintains a large list of sites to upgrade for doesn't really mean that much given that HTTPS upgrade policies (ought to) just all be based on the same lists. It's the same issue as above, I'm not worried about what data you use, that should be something that a lot of different extensions pull from. I'm worried about the capabilities, I'm worried about how effectively the browser can actually leverage that data set.

HTTPS Everywhere does not have a rule for indochino.com in its own database. There are some indochino.com related entries in DuckDuckGo Smarter Encryption database, which HTTPS Everywhere is using, but indochino loads fine for me with HTTPS Everywhere enabled.