I thought DDG wasn't really a search engine but just a front end. It use to be a front end to Google and now its a front end to BING. Am I right or wrong about that?
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Analyst Argues Apple Should Acquire DuckDuckGo Search Engine
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God, please NO!
Leave them as independent and let them focus on privacy only. I don't want MS, Google, Apple, Facebook, or Amazon buying these privacy-based search engines. Knowing Apple they'd probably somehow try to integrate Siri into it and then start trying to charge customers for searches.
Leave them as independent and let them focus on privacy only. I don't want MS, Google, Apple, Facebook, or Amazon buying these privacy-based search engines. Knowing Apple they'd probably somehow try to integrate Siri into it and then start trying to charge customers for searches.
Apple would likely merge DuckDuckGo into iOS and macOS at the operating system level. Siri already has embedded Machine Learning that surfaces answers to questions from the web without having to launch a browser and when it can't find an answer, it shows you Google results. DuckDuckGo would significantly improve that capability.
Search is so incredibly important to the future of computers that will be based on artificial intelligence assistants, that it's pretty amazing that Apple hasn't bolstered their search capabilities yet. I'll assume that they're not completely incompetent and have in fact already built a search engine as backup but have chosen to keep it buried because Google pays them $10 billion a year to use Google.
If Apple could make DDG better then yeah, this would be great. Currently (like many others it seems) I use DDG by default but fail over to Google all too often. The problem is Apple’s track record with services is bloody awful, to put it mildly.
Incidentally, I actually don’t care about Google keeping track of my search history and selling it to advertisers. Its their humongous market share I don’t like. No one organisation should have that much power (I feel the same way about Amazon).
If Apple were going to release an in-house alternative to a Google service I vote for YouTube. That service could benefit more than most others from a touch of Apple’s UI magic. The YouTube UX is bad enough on desktop, but on i/iPadOS it’s nigh unusable. An Apple version wouldn't have to be anything clever or advanced, so I think they’d struggle to mess it up. Just host videos and have a nice UI.
Incidentally, I actually don’t care about Google keeping track of my search history and selling it to advertisers. Its their humongous market share I don’t like. No one organisation should have that much power (I feel the same way about Amazon).
If Apple were going to release an in-house alternative to a Google service I vote for YouTube. That service could benefit more than most others from a touch of Apple’s UI magic. The YouTube UX is bad enough on desktop, but on i/iPadOS it’s nigh unusable. An Apple version wouldn't have to be anything clever or advanced, so I think they’d struggle to mess it up. Just host videos and have a nice UI.
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Yep. For a major computer company and how important search and the internet is to modern life, it seems like Apple is being negligent in this space.
Granted, if someone paid me $8billion to fidlle my thumbs..
Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft (plus a few others) probably have the resources to compete.
The biggest issue here is that people who wants to leave Google aren't looking for a better search results - they're looking for privacy. Privacy isn't where the money is at. Microsoft and Apple are primarily interested in money, so spending billions to merely break-even isn't interesting to them. Everyone knows Amazon and Facebook have a lack of privacy as a central tenant - even if they said they had a private search engine, nobody would trust them to really tell the truth.
Another enormous search engine can't be built by a big company. The only two organizations I can imagine making a massive, privacy focused search engine are DuckDuckGo, and maybe the Wikimedia Foundation (if they could acquire DDG as a starting point.)
... maybe Mozilla or RedHat (owned by IBM for the past few years.)
I put up with DDG's subpar results because I don't want to feed an opaque gazillion dollar company with my search history. If Apple controlled DDG it would lose its one redeeming feature, and would gain Apple's famous short-attention-span approach to maintaining and supporting new technologies.
I tried to do this whole "de-google" thing a year or so ago and honestly I think it became harder to manage my privacy.
Google, despite being ad focused (i.e. you're the product), gives you an awful lot of granular control over how they track you. Once you start branching away from Google, then you have multiple services with less granular control, and it becomes a nightmare to try and control. So I came back to Google and just took more proactive measures on my account to manage/remove tracking.
Google, despite being ad focused (i.e. you're the product), gives you an awful lot of granular control over how they track you. Once you start branching away from Google, then you have multiple services with less granular control, and it becomes a nightmare to try and control. So I came back to Google and just took more proactive measures on my account to manage/remove tracking.
They could start by making it the default search engine! Or do they care about evil Google money more than our privacy?
I think this will happen, but the Apple branded search engine will happen only after the Apple branded low cost monitor and the Apple branded wifi router.
Google search is beyond crawlers and indices, in how they organize data into knowledge graph. It is semantic search and they have been at it for a decade at least. Apple shouldn't buy it unless they have aspiration and passion. I don't see Apple being passionate about anything more than hardware.
perfect substitute to google. can outdo google too but it may take sometimes to catch up with google's features
Privacy is definitely something that Apple is vocally interested in, and has prominently used as a marketing tool. Billboards in Las Vegas, TV commercials. So it DOES have an inherent value to Apple and it’s brand. Apple’s reputation is easily worth the the effort. And who knows, they may even make money from it, directly or indirectly or even as something of a machine learning tool. Or as Google has, using it’s expertise garnered from in it in other supporting endeavors.
Besides, i donlt think Google and privacy is the problem, but having a government in check that will not try to abuse power to snoop on people as we have seen them try with backdoors and wiretaps in the same of security. It’s more about monopolies. Monopolies have far more direct impact on consumers and the free market on a daily level.
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I like DuckDuckGo because it doesn’t seem to censor search results too much. I can find images more easily and on occasion, adult content more easily.
But Apple has a strict ”no adult content on our platform” policy, so I suspect a DDG acquisition by Apple would lead to removing adult content from the DDG search index.
There needs to be *at least one* independent uncensored privacy-focused search engine, and I don’t want Apple corrupting that.
But Apple has a strict ”no adult content on our platform” policy, so I suspect a DDG acquisition by Apple would lead to removing adult content from the DDG search index.
There needs to be *at least one* independent uncensored privacy-focused search engine, and I don’t want Apple corrupting that.
Every single time I do a complicated search query, Google is always doing better than DuckDuckGo. I hope Apple doesn't buy it.
Then beats me.
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Apple buying DDG wouldn’t stop you from using Google.
Apple should have taken Disney when it was trading for around $80 or less not too long ago.
Ah, another day, another “Apple should acquire X” because I say so thread.
It’s worth noting that at this point, Google needs Apple more than Apple needs Google. That Google is willing to pay Apple so much every year is testament to this - because Apple owns the best customers and is increasingly building a wall between them and other companies like Google and Facebook.
If the day ever comes that Google decides to withhold their search engine from apple devices (I am not sure how this would even work, given that google search runs in the browser), Apple could acquire DDG, but probably not before. 9 billion a year is a lot of money to give up.
It’s worth noting that at this point, Google needs Apple more than Apple needs Google. That Google is willing to pay Apple so much every year is testament to this - because Apple owns the best customers and is increasingly building a wall between them and other companies like Google and Facebook.
If the day ever comes that Google decides to withhold their search engine from apple devices (I am not sure how this would even work, given that google search runs in the browser), Apple could acquire DDG, but probably not before. 9 billion a year is a lot of money to give up.
DDG is just Bing but without the tracking for most results. Why would Apple ever want a fancy bing scraper?
Apple should focus on it's hardware & make better Macbooks
Apple should focus on it's hardware & make better Macbooks