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Tag: Gabriel Weinberg

  • DuckDuckGo Adds More Microsoft Tracking Protection, Now Better Than Ever

    DuckDuckGo Adds More Microsoft Tracking Protection, Now Better Than Ever

    DuckDuckGo has added additional protection against Microsoft tracking, addressing concerns that were raised in May.

    DuckDuckGo is one of the leading privacy-oriented companies, providing a suite of apps and services that help users protect their privacy online. Despite blocking the vast majority of Microsoft trackers, researchers discovered in May that a very small percentage of Microsoft’s trackers were not blocked under some circumstances.

    DuckDuckGo has been working hard to address the issue and will be rolling out additional protections over the next week to block even more Microsoft trackers, specifically those loaded by third-party websites.

    CEO Gabriel Weinberg outlined the steps the company is taking:

    Over the next week, we will expand the third-party tracking scripts we block from loading on websites to include scripts from Microsoft in our browsing apps (iOS and Android) and our browser extensions (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge and Opera), with beta apps to follow in the coming month. This expands our 3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection, which blocks identified tracking scripts from Facebook, Google, and other companies from loading on third-party websites, to now include third-party Microsoft tracking scripts. This web tracking protection is not offered by most other popular browsers by default and sits on top of many other DuckDuckGo protections.

    Interestingly, because of the method used to load Microsoft trackers, the number of additional ads being blocked is very small.

    “Prior to this update, we were already blocking most MSFT scripts from loading and further restricting Microsoft tracking through our other web tracking protections, like blocking Microsoft’s third-party cookies in our browsers,” a company spokesperson told WPN. “Often websites use tag managers to load multiple other scripts, the most popular one is Google Tag manager. Since most Microsoft scripts load through tag managers, those requests were already being blocked by 3rd Party Tracker Loading Protection before this update. In fact, we ran a test to see how much more blocking is happening as a result of this new update and based on the top 1,000 websites we found the increase was only 0.25%.”

    The company’s findings illustrate how effectively it was already blocking Microsoft’s trackers and how overblown the initial concerns were.

    Even so, with these latest rounds of improvements, DuckDuckGo has cemented its reputation, offering better out-of-the-box privacy than Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and others.

  • Researcher Discovers DuckDuckGo Allows Some Microsoft Trackers

    Researcher Discovers DuckDuckGo Allows Some Microsoft Trackers

    DuckDuckGo is receiving criticism for the terms of a deal with Microsoft that has resulted in some Microsoft trackers being whitelisted.

    DDG has made a name for itself as a privacy-first company, building a search engine, browser extensions, and web browsers around the premise of protecting user privacy. The company is one of the few that truly makes an effort to protect user privacy and data. Unfortunately, its terms with Microsoft have caused some concern.

    Unlike Google, Bing, or Brave, DDG gets its search results from other engines, with the bulk of them coming from Bing. The company has long claimed to strip out trackers from the search results it provides, although clicking an ad from Microsoft in the search results is handled differently. DDG has never made a secret of the fact that clicking on those ads sends a user’s IP address to Microsoft, since the user is leaving DDG and entering Microsoft’s space.

    Unfortunately, DDG had not been able to disclose the terms of the deal that whitelisted some Microsoft trackers, due to a confidentiality clause in the agreement between the two companies. Security researcher Zach Edwards first made the discovery and tweeted about it:

    Sometimes you find something so disturbing during an audit, you’ve gotta check/recheck because you assume that *something* must be broken in the test. But I’m confident now. The new @DuckDuckGo browsers for iOS/Android don’t block Microsoft data flows, for LinkedIn or Bing.

    — Zach Edwards (@thezedwards), May 23, 2022

    Ironically, DDG doesn’t even block Microsoft’s data trackers on Workplace.com, a Facebook-owned domain that it brags about blocking Facebook’s trackers on.

    Needless to say, DDG CEO Gabriel Weinberg is doing his best to put out the fire:

    We’ve been working tirelessly behind the scenes to change these requirements, though our syndication agreement also has a confidentially provision that prevents disclosing details. Again, we expect to have an update soon that will include more third-party Microsoft protection.

    — Gabriel Weinberg (@yegg), May 23, 2022

    Of course, Weinberg might not have to put out so big a fire if his company had disclosed this issue first, rather than waiting until it was uncovered by a security researcher.

    In the meantime, Shivan Kaul Sahib, Privacy Engineer for Brave, highlighted the inherent conflict of interest for a company that relies on the good graces of another company making money off of ad trackers.

    This is shocking. DuckDuckGo has a search deal with Microsoft which prevents them from blocking MS trackers. And they can’t talk about it! This is why privacy products that are beholden to giant corporations can never deliver true privacy; the business model just doesn’t work.

    — Shivan Kaul Sahib (@shivan_kaul), May 23, 2022

    Speaking of Brave, the company is one of the only ones on the market that provides a truly independent alternative to Google and Bing. The company bought Tailcat, allowing it to build its own search engine that relies on a completely independent web index. This keeps Brave from being beholden to Microsoft, Google, or any other company.

    With a privacy-focused browser and a truly independent search engine, Brave is quickly establishing itself as a much better privacy solution than DDG.

    In the meantime, here is a statement from Weinberg that was provided to WPN:

    “We have always been extremely careful to never promise anonymity when browsing, because that frankly isn’t possible given how quickly trackers change how they work to evade protections and the tools we currently offer. When most other browsers on the market talk about tracking protection they are usually referring to 3rd-party cookie protection and fingerprinting protection, and our browsers for iOS, Android, and our new Mac beta, impose these restrictions on third-party tracking scripts, including those from Microsoft. 

    “What we’re talking about here is an above-and-beyond protection that most browsers don’t even attempt to do — that is, blocking third-party tracking scripts before they load on 3rd party websites. Because we’re doing this where we can, users are still getting significantly more privacy protection with DuckDuckGo than they would using Safari, Firefox and other browsers. This blog post we published gets into the real benefits users enjoy from this approach, like faster load times (46% average decrease) and less data transferred (34% average decrease). Our goal has always been to provide the most privacy we can in one download, by default without any complicated settings.” 

    “I understand this is all rather confusing because it is a search syndication contract that is preventing us from doing a non-search thing. That’s because our product is a bundle of multiple privacy protections, and this is a distribution requirement imposed on us as part of the search syndication agreement that helps us privately use some Bing results to provide you with better private search results overall. While a lot of what you see on our results page privately incorporates content from other sources, including our own indexes (e.g., Wikipedia, Local listings, Sports, etc.), we source most of our traditional links and images privately from Bing (though because of other search technology our link and image results still may look different). Really only two companies (Google and Microsoft) have a high-quality global web link index (because I believe it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to do), and so literally every other global search engine needs to bootstrap with one or both of them to provide a mainstream search product. The same is true for maps btw — only the biggest companies can similarly afford to put satellites up and send ground cars to take streetview pictures of every neighborhood.

    “Anyway, I hope this provides some helpful context. Taking a step back, I know our product is not perfect and will never be. Nothing can provide 100% protection. And we face many constraints: platform constraints (we can’t offer all protections on every platform do to limited APIs or other restrictions), limited contractual constraints (like in this case), breakage constraints (blocking some things totally breaks web experiences), and of course the evolving tracking arms race that we constantly work to keep ahead of. That’s why we have always been extremely careful to never promise anonymity when browsing outside our search engine, because that frankly isn’t possible. We’re also working on updates to our app store descriptions to make this more clear. Holistically though I believe what we offer is the best thing out there for mainstream users who want simple privacy protection without breaking things, and that is our product vision.”

    Updated 5/25/22: Edited for clarity and to add Gabriel Weinberg’s statement.

  • EFF Partners With DuckDuckGo, Adopts Its HTTPS Dataset

    EFF Partners With DuckDuckGo, Adopts Its HTTPS Dataset

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is partnering with DuckDuckGo to include the latter’s HTTPS dataset in its HTTPS Everywhere browser extension.

    The EFF and DuckDuckGo are closely aligned in their commitment to protecting user privacy. DuckDuckGo’s privacy browser extension for the desktop, and its standalone privacy browser for iOS, rely on the company’s Smarter Encryption technology.

    Smarter Encryption upgrades a standard unencrypted (HTTP) website connection to an encrypted (HTTPS) connection where possible. Smarter Encryption is more advanced than many competing options, since DuckDuckGo crawls and re-crawls the web to keep its dataset current.

    The EFF is now adopting DuckDuckGo’s Smart Encryption dataset for use in its own HTTPS Everywhere browser extension. Like Smart Encryption, HTTPS Everywhere is designed to help upgrade insecure connections. The EFF’s solution previously used “a crowd-sourced list of encrypted HTTPS versions of websites,” a less efficient and less comprehensive solution than DuckDuckGo’s.

    “DuckDuckGo Smarter Encryption has a list of millions of HTTPS-encrypted websites, generated by continually crawling the web instead of through crowdsourcing, which will give HTTPS Everywhere users more coverage for secure browsing,” said Alexis Hancock, EFF Director of Engineering and manager of HTTPS Everywhere and Certbot web encrypting projects. “We’re thrilled to be partnering with DuckDuckGo as we see HTTPS become the default protocol on the net and contemplate HTTPS Everywhere’s future.”

    “EFFs pioneering work with the HTTPS Everywhere extension took privacy protection in a new and needed direction, seamlessly upgrading people to secure website connections,” said Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo founder and CEO. “We’re delighted that EFF has now entrusted DuckDuckGo to power HTTPS Everywhere going forward, using our next generation Smarter Encryption dataset.”

  • Is DuckDuckGo Gaining Ground on Google?

    Is DuckDuckGo Gaining Ground on Google?

    In recent years, the search industry has not changed a lot in terms of large players. Google has maintained the leader position with its ownership of nearly 70 percent of search market share. The #2 and #3 spots have changed slightly after the Microsoft-Yahoo Search Alliance in 2009. According to the most recent Experian-Hitwise statistics, Bing-powered search has risen to 30 percent.

    Hitwise April Search Market Share Report

    In 2010, Ask exited the search business to focus its efforts on a Q/A service and mobile endeavors. Also in 2010, Blekko launched with the goal of becoming the “#3 search engine” by tackling the growing problem of spam with its slashtag technology approach.

    Other than these events, the search player side of the industry has been relatively quiet. There is, however, current talk of Yahoo re-entering the search market and pulling out of its 10-year search deal with Microsoft. This week, the company introduced Yahoo Axis, which could be its first move in this direction.

    Still, there is one more player that we have yet to mention – DuckDuckGo. This search engine launched quietly in 2008 and has stayed somewhat low on the radar until recently. It is getting a lot of attention now though for the bold position it is taking on major issues.

    Gabriel Weinberg, Founder of DuckDuckGo When we talked with the search engine’s founder Gabriel Weinberg last year, he told us that DuckDuckGo was focused on building a search alternative to Google. The search engine separates itself from other search engines through its Zero-Click Info feature that provides instant answers to search queries, its user experience that is free of both spam and clutter, and its privacy protections for users.

    Over the past year, DuckDuckGo has ramped up its efforts in each of these areas, and as a result, users are noticing. In a recent conversation with Weinberg, he tells us that DuckDuckGo receives just under 50 million search queries a month, which translates into about 1.5 million each day. In other words, the search engine has more than doubled its traffic.

    “We’ve grown gradually since the beginning, but we had a major uptick at the beginning of the year when we launched a visual redesign,” said Weinberg.

    He explained that DuckDuckGo made around 100 changes that it rolled out in that redesign. More recently, the search engine announced an effort that encourages developers to add instant answer plugins to DuckDuckGo. The initiative is called DuckDuckHack and is geared toward making the search experience faster and more relevant.

    DuckDuckHack Example

    Local, mobile, and social are also just as important to DuckDuckGo as they are to other search engines. Instead of viewing them as individual products, however, it uses an “umbrella approach” for them. In other words, all these areas are incorporated into finding the best search results.

    “Instead of tailoring results to you personally,” says Weinberg, “we, instead, return results that are generally known to be good.”

    Ultimately, DuckDuckGo is trying to improve in all the areas that Google seems to be lacking in. For instance, Google has had many struggles regarding content farms and spam in the past couple of years. Although it has attempted to address these issues with the ongoing Panda updates, some people, including Weinberg, believe the problems still exist.

    “A lot of it seems opaque to me,” said Weinberg. “I’m sure there’s a ton of changes, but I still see a lot of the same kind of, what I consider, content farms on Google.”

    The privacy issues against Google continue to build as well. The search giant has received scrutiny from both the U.S. and Europe, and after releasing its new privacy policy earlier this year, it has gotten even more criticism.

    For DuckDuckGo, this turn of events creates an opportunity. As users become more dissatisfied with Google, Weinberg is hoping that they’ll look to his search engine as an alternative.

    “We’re making the case that there are certainly some users who would prefer to be tracked a lot less,” he said. “I really think there is a percentage who prefer alternative experiences.”

    The irony in all this is that DuckDuckGo makes money the same way that Google does – through advertising based on search queries. But, “you don’t have to track users to do that,” Weinberg says.

    “The problem is that they want to serve better ads across their sites where you don’t have that search query to serve an ad against,” he further explained.

    While it is possible that DuckDuckGo could begin to pull away some of Google’s search market share, Weinberg tell us that DuckDuckGo has no desire to become a big corporation. Web search is the company’s #1 priority at this point, and he intends to keep it that way.

    “Our goal really is just to build a nice alternative search engine that… a decent percentage of people would prefer as their search engine of choice,” he said.

  • Why It’s Easier for a Startup (Than For Google) to Take Action on Content Farms

    A couple weeks ago, we reported that DuckDuckGo had followed its own blocking of content farms (like eHow) by promoting content from wikiHow. This begged the question: how much better is wikihow’s content? We had a conversation about that with Jack Herrick, founder of wikiHow (and one-time owner of eHow). In fact, we had a second conversation about that as well (look for an article on that soon). 

    We also had a conversation with DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg. Part of that was about how DuckDuckGo differs from Google with regards to privacy. The subject then turned to search quality, content farm blocking, and the hard-wiring of select content to the top of the search results. 

    "Right from the beginning when we launched two and a half years ago, one of the main motivations for even doing the search engine in the first place was to remove what I would call ‘useless sites’ (I try to use the term ‘useless’, not spam – although I guess people take offense with both)," Weinberg tells WebProNews. "Most of it’s algorithmic, so we crawl the web a lot, looking for these sites that just have ads on them basically…Demand Media is on a little different category, where they do have content on their sites. It’s just lower quality content on average. So for those type of sites – these big content farms, which are generating very low quality content, I sort of waited to see user complaints about it, and then do investigation myself."

    "In this case, right from the beginning, I was getting lots of complaints about eHow and the other sites," he continues. "Eventually, I started looking into it, and there’s lots of well-documented articles where people who have worked for Demand Media in the past, and who no longer work for it, and have written up their experience and evaluations of the content, and there are some high quality pages for sure, but there’s a lot of really low-quality, inaccurate stuff, and there’s so much out on the Internet now, that when you block something like eHow, users don’t even notice."

    "All they notice is that ‘you’ve got better results,’" he adds. "So it’s a pretty easy decision to make at that point from our perspective. From Google’s perspective it’s a lot harder because they can get in trouble…they’re under government scrutiny, and all sorts of things. They can get in trouble for censorship…it’s much easier for a startup to do it (like us) than it is for Google."

    He then explained the reasoning for the wikiHow "hard-wiring" (which by the way is the phrase wikHow has been using to describe it). 

    "We have this concept, which I mentioned, of zero-click info, which really shows a box above the results when you match the topic exactly," Weinberg explains. "It’s not really hard-wiring the first result. It’s more like above the first result, there’ll be this box occasionally that gives you instant answers. We’ve done this with literally 40 sources at this point. Wikipedia is the biggest, but we also do CrunchBase, Wikia – all sorts of high quality wikis that have good content and spam under control. So Wikihow is really just our 40th source of one of those."

    It is an interesting one, however, considering it comes from the previous owner of eHow. 

    "The reason why they’re better is that they’re more akin to Wikipedia, where they have this good process of user-generated content, where spam is kept down, and they have editors look at things, and generally they have a lot less pages than eHow, and their pages are a lot more high quality. So it just make sense to when you search for something…you get this information right at the top of the results that says, ‘ok, this is how you do it.’ And it says ‘more at WikiHow’ if you want to see the whole article. Then underneath that, you’ll get regular results."

    Weinberg says he hopes search engines will look more closely at these search quality issues.

    "It’s definitely come to a turning point in the past couple months with you and other people reporting…the problem is it’s really hard to evaluate relevancy across search engines, so a lot of this evidence is all anecdotal," he says. "You have to give Google credit in that respect. They have their internal relevancy metrics, and we have ours, etc. but a lot of these articles are anecdotal, but they could hardly be anything else, because there’s no standard metric. I do hope that it gets more attention, and I do think that it has gotten more attention recently."

    He says DuckDuckGO will continue to add more sources to the zero-click concept, the way it has added wikiHow. We’ll have more about wikiHow’s quality and editorial practices shortly, from a conversation with founder Jack Herrick.

  • DuckDuckGo Founder Makes the Case For His Search Engine (vs. Google)

    Gabriel Weinberg, founder of alterative search engine DuckDuckGo sat down to talk with WebProNews about what people can get out of DuckDuckGo that they can’t get from the Google experience. 

    "I’m not anti-Google," he says. "I know that they take privacy very seriously, and I respect what they’re doing, but they’re doing a few things that – one they can avoid, and one they can’t avoid – and both of which, we don’t do."

    "The first is, literally, they save your searches when you search Google, whether you’re logged in or not, and we don’t log any of that information," he continues. "When you search at DuckDuckGo, we literally don’t save the information about your computer that you send to us, which is…your IP address and your user agent. So there’s no way to tie your searches to you, or even to tie your searches together. Whereas on Google, you can do that, so if law enforcement, say, comes and asks for your searches, they can be retrieved and used against you. In Google’s defense, they use that to help track you to make your searches better, and to target advertising to you across the web."

    "The other way is (which part of my campaign is hoping that Google will fix this, because I don’t think it’s necessary for them to do this), is when you click on a link in Google, your search terms are sent to the site you click on," he adds. "It’s this technical thing that got started when the Internet got started, but nowadays, ad networks will aggregate that information, and third-parties can sell your profiles to other people that use your searches. That’s completely unnecessary. At DuckDuckGo, we don’t do that. We do this special kind of technical re-direct thing to make sure your searches aren’t passed to other sites."

    Weinberg maintains that DuckDuckGo’s results are just as relevant without tracking your search history.  

    "The proof is in the results…they use that as one of like a thousand signals, and it just seems like it’s not a very useful signal," he says. "They say it’s used a lot to make your results relevant, and they do change a bit (you can tell by logging out and logging in), but it’s mainly more used to target advertising to you across the web, because Google runs a huge ad network. AdSense runs on millions of sites, and so it’s mainly more used for that when you’re off the search page [when] you’re on another website – to get good ads. We have no need to do that. We don’t run an ad network across the world, so we don’t need to save your searches for that reason."

    Weinberg also talked about DuckDuckGo’s approach to content farms and search quality. You can watch the above video for more on that. We also discuss that more in a separate article.