Apple considered switching to DuckDuckGo from Google for Safari - Bloomberg News
Apple held talks with DuckDuckGo to replace Alphabet's Google as the default search engine for the private mode on Apple's Safari browser, the Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the discussions.
This is a copy/pasted message I wrote up on another thread. As long as there are people in the comments shilling kagi, I will shill my prefered engines. At least my suggestions will bring awareness to free as in freedom projects. I hope to god people paying 10$/month just to not get datacucked by search engines will also learn something and save their money.
SearX/SearXNG is a free and open source, highly customizable, and self-hostable meta search engine. SearX instances act as a middle man, they query other search engines for you, stripping all their spyware ad crap and never having your connection touch their servers. Of course you have to trust the SearX instance host with your query information, but again if you are that paranoid just self host.
I personally trust some foss loving sysadmin that host social services for free out of alturism, who also accepts hosting donations, whos server is located on the other side of the planet, with my query info over Google/Alphabet any day.
Its nice to be able to email and have a human conversation with your search engine provider thats just a knowlegable every day joe who genuinely believes in the project and freely dedicates their resources to it. Consider sending some cash their way to help with upkeep if you like the services they provide, they will probably appreciate and make use of that 10$ better than kagi.
Heres a list of all public searx instances, I personally prefer to use paulgo.io All SearX instances are configured different to index different engines. If one doesn't seem to give good results try a few others.
Did I mention it has bangs like duckduckgo? If you really need google like for maps and buisness info just use !!g in the query
search.marginalia.nu is a completely novel search engine written and hosted by one dude that aims to prioritize indexing lighter websites little to no javascript as these tend to be personal websites and homepages that have poor SEO and the big search engines won't index well. If you remember the internet of the early 2000s and want a nostalgia trip this ones for you. Its also open source and self-hostable
Finally, YaCy is another completely novel search engine that uses peer-to-peer technology to power a big webcrawler which prioritizes indexes based off user queries and feedback. Everyone can download yacy and devote a bit of their computing power to both run their own local instance and help out a collective search engine. Companies can also download yacy and use it to index their private intranets.
They have a public instance available through a web portal. To be upfront, YaCy is not a great search engine for what most people usually want, which is quick and relevant information within the first few clicks. But, it is an interesting use of technology and what a true honest-to-god community-operated search engine looks like untainted by SEO scores or corporate money-making shenanigans.
I hope this has been informative to those who believe theres only a few options to pick from, I know these options are so unknown to most people.
Thank you! So I can use Google but stop it from doing the CAPCHA shit repeatedly because it detects my VPN? It's abuse of the user and I'm tired of it.
I use Kagi right now but search.marginalia.nu and YaCy seem really cool. Hell, I might package YaCy and write a module for it for NixOS :)
I’m trying Kagi now but I’m having mixed feelings. Search results are mixed at best for some pretty commonplace topics (e.g. Starfield quests or breaking news).
Also, the search limit (for the trial and basic plans) stresses me and I find myself second guessing whether I really need to search for something. I like it but I haven’t come across a “wow!” moment that makes me want to abandon DDG, despite the transparency and privacy-focus.
datacucked
uuuuusing it
I don't mind you suggesting these, they're cool projects, but the "coMmEnTs sHiLLinG kAgI" and "mAke UsE of tHat 10$ beTteR thAn KaGi" stuff is so unnecessary. I mean just... why?
I have a bad habit of mixing personal bias into things when I get into a passionate writing fit and it sometimes comes off as pretentious dickery. I never set out to attack kagi users themselves even if I can now see now it did come across and those comments were unneeded. I was being a pretentious jerk with those comments and apologize to all you kagi users for my assholery.
I do think its a waste to spend money on a search engine, and that open source software instance maintainers could probably make use that $ better than another search engine startup. I am being honest with those personal opinions. But its not my place to judge those who decide they are in a well enough financial spot to pay $ for a service that adds precieved value to their life or where they decide to pay it to.
Its fustrating as a FOSS nerd to see so many people shill yet another subscription based service feeding money into another souless company that makes promises of protecting your data and not selling it to ad companies now but has no gaurentee of holding those promises over time. That's how the subscription services get you once they have you, slowly changing promises and creeping in their money making bs but slowly enough to not be too jarring. Maybe I'm just disillusioned with things after being burned so many times. Best of luck to you though I hope it continues to be a valuable service to those willing to pay for it.
Thank you! I'm intrigued by Kagi but it's a lot of money. I've tried SearXNG before it wasn't great for me, I'll try it again.
I hope you find more success with it this time. Like I said not all SearXNG instances are equal paulgo.io was the first to really click with me and give useful results. Some SearXNG instances won't query google or most other engines making their usefulness rather limited. Also the more popular an instance becomes the more likely it will be rate-limited by search engines which isn't the fault of the instance but can be an occasional annoyance for sure. Not perfect solution by any means but I think SearX would be a great fit for lots of people here who just want google results without all the spyware ad bs
Nice choice of lemmy instance, btw. Pubnixes like SDF rule!
My issue with SearXNG is that I cannot natively use it on mobile (iOS). Might be a small issue for most but I need to be able to type into my browser's search bar and it utilize that search engine. Open browser > navigate to search homepage > enter query is a lot slower, especially if I am out and about and need information quickly.
If there is some way to configure this I'd love to hear about it, but Safari on iOS limits you to a handful of search engines. I use DDG today.
I did a quick search and found instructions to what I think you are asking for hopefully this helps. The query string for paulgo.io is "https://paulgo.io/search?q="
I have also heard Xsearch works
xSearch on the AppStore lets you use any search engine with Safari.
Hey just to update I heard XSearch works if that other thing didn't work out
When you need a scalable service for tons of users, federated isn't going to cut it. This is why Apple wants DDG. Point the bajillion crApple lusers at one of your public instances (or even all of them chosen at random each time) and watch it crash and burn overnight. DDG has tons of servers and the infrastructure to hold up while a ton of people search why their luxury device is slowing down every time Apple releases a new one.
Lol Federation is the definition of scalable. Everyone serves their local users -> a miniscule amount of global traffic, everything but auth always stays local.
Universities have been doing it since the beginning of the internet. Email is the biggest example but there are others: eduGAIN and eduroam are the most notable ones coming out of the academic community.
I don't know what the fuck is going on with Kagi on Lemmy. They must be using bots or paying people for promoting them. I just don't get how people can trust them so much when they haven't released the code for anything, they require you to be logged in which makes the user uniquely identifiable and therefore could easily correlate your searches to your identity (even if they claim not to, it's just a "trust me, bro")
What is a kagi
Yeah it's ridiculous, seems like there's a shill army of this proprietary service here.
Saved. Thank you for your time and thoroughness!
shilling kagi
Shilling means that you're claiming people (like me) who've been recommending Kagi are in fact secretly paid to do covert advertising.
Are you using that word wrong, or do you actually believe that we're all liars?
Thanks Yacy looks promising
You're welcome updated the comment with proper links
thank you, great post
Would also recommend whoogle. They have done public ones iirc but also hand a self hosted option (that I use behind a VPN) for those that line self hosted shit
i have tried these alternate search engines and I have to always come back to google. A friend I trust a lot swears that kagi is the best search engine, and so do other people I know, so it must have some merit.
Wow, USB-C and DDG in the same year? Look at Apple trying to stay relevant 😉
They didn’t switch to USB-C out of the goodness of their hearts. They switched because the EU passed a new law that requires that new smartphones have USB-C ports.
Apple will never do anything for any other reasons besides: regulation and profit. They try and foster this image of humanitarianism and ethics, but meanwhile they build everything in sweatshops and make their own "standards" so that their loyal customers can only use the functions they need by purchasing additional dongles.
I'm happy that they were forced into an actual standard, but I've already heard at least two apple users IRL claiming that USB-C is inferior for [insert random reasoning here]. Apple has cultivated the idea that they are above standards for a long time and it will take a long time to break.
Ah yes, the second largest company in the world “trying to stay relevant”
* In terms of profit, after the Saudi Arabian Oil Group. Huh, I had no idea.
Of all of the things that I vastly prefer since moving to Lemmy from reddit, anything related to Apple is not one of them. I'm actually surprised because talking about anything Apple on reddit was always a circlejerk pitchfork parade, but Lemmy still seems to outdo. The "trying to stay relevant comment" is honestly hilarious. Sure, the richest company with more than 50% of the smartphone market, that basically feeds design to the rest of the industry is trying to stay relevant.
And another thing worth addressing, It's probably 50/50 whether the EU is forcing them to USB-C, or just providing cover for them to move to USB-C. Modern Apple (after 1997) rarely has used proprietary standards for cables/connectors, and when they have it's pretty obviously because there isn't a better option, or more likely, there isn't an option that is suited to their purpose. Apple is/was largely the reason we're even talking about USB, being one of the first to really adopt it. Then the dock connector for iPods, which is probably the most major example of them using a proprietary connector. If you read that link (just wiki) you'll see that the dock connector did things that no other standard connector did at the time, and it did it in a form factor that would work with iPods. Fast forward 10 years and Apple eats shit in the press for changing to Lightning, which pre-dated USB-C and has obvious advantages over one of the worst computer connectors in modern history - micro-USB. Apple contributed significantly to the USB-C spec, which includes many of the advantages that Lightning had first, built off of the work they did with Intel in creating another standard, Thunderbolt.
And then on to today, where Apple is "forced" to use USB-C. Again, in 2016, Apple moved all of their high end laptops to exclusively USB-C, for which they would again be pilloried. People are still pissed those laptops dropped USB-A and MagSafe in favor of trying to drive adoption of USB-C and a one-connector-rules-them-all world. They also moved their Pro iPads over to C in 2018. Basically, Apple started moving its high-end, less price conscious customers to C long before legislation was a gleam in anyone's eye. Their cheaper products (base model iPads) and mass-consumer products (iPhones) they moved much slower on, and even then there were a slate of "Apple keeps changing connectors all of the time!" (twice in 20 years) outrage-bait articles.
Yes, Apple was "forced" to use the connector they created the first design references for (Lightning/Thunderbolt, and to a lesser extend Mini-DisplayPort) and then helped design, then moved to before most, in a bid to stay "relevant" in a field they already dominate.
Also worth noting that Apple was a main driver of adoption of USB-A, and took heat when they converted iMacs to it over PS/2, far before most PC vendors did.
This alone, the amount of negative press they garnered, meant that there was likely no way Apple was going to move iPhones off of Lightning for 10 years.
I really really don’t think Apple needs to do much to stay relevant.
Surprised to see so many plugging kagi in this thread. A subscription to search the internet seems crazy to me. Is it that good?
It's like Google back in 2010. You find stuff you are looking for without pages and pages of ads, spam, and clickbait.
If you hit a domain which is obviously spam, you can block it forever. If you find a domain you really like, you can promote it for future results.
It's clear that Google's motivation is no longer to offer good results. It's to maximise the time you're on the site, and the number of ads and spam sites you click. Their goal is now, literally, to feed you bad results.
Every good result they serve you could have been an ad, so they're incentivised to replace as many with ads as possible.
This article is a pretty good summary of why, by Google's own words, an ad driven search experience will be rubbish:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics
Not only does Kagi produce great search results, as good as "old Google" IMO, its business model means the above cannot (or at least, shouldn't) happen. If it ever changed its model to include ads etc it would collapse so fast.
So for me, unlike the other poster, I'd recommend it to everyone who's finding the existing search engines are rubbish and full of useless Etsy and SEO etc links.
Pinterest links are the worst. I just don’t want that shit and images of random crap isn’t what I’m after.
Brave words divorced from reality.
Cable companies wouldn’t insert ads, people pay for a premium experience with cable instead of getting their TV free over the air. If they did people would just cancel and watch free tv.
Then later: Streaming companies wouldn’t insert ads, the ability to watch on your time, terms and without interruption is part of the appeal, if they did their customers would leave them and they’d collapse. It would be the death of any company foolish enough to do so.
🤡
Markets and competition will save us cried the fool with no knowledge of history.
If they grow they need to keep growing, if their results are good enough they’ll introduce “limited” tracking for “trusted partners” with limited ads that are “valuable and relevant”. And from there it can spiral more but you’ve already lost.
As revenue, tracking, taking a big yearly check from Zuck or whoever to share your data with them. It’s a good source of revenue and unless this company is privately financed by one weirdo entirely out of their own pockets they have a responsibility to investors to get them ever increasing year over year returns.
Of course the typical thing to do is to get big enough first like streaming. Train the fool consumers to pay for something they’re getting for free, normalize that, grow, then sock them with ads, tracking, inconveniences and train them to accept more and more of it.
Paying for a service ensures your incentives (mostly) align. Kagi's incentive is to make a good search that makes you want to pay for it, google's incentives are to gather your data to either sell or use themselves, and show you as many ads as possible.
I thought it sounded pretty silly, too. I gave the free trial a shot and for technical searches it was the best I had seen by far. Being able to lower certain sites and raise other sites makes it much easier to filter through shitty results like blog posts and stuff. I pay for it now and it's worth it to me just for the time savings on technical searches. It definitely is still pretty far behind for things like local business info and stuff, but as a general purpose search engine it's been extremely good for me.
Or the most annoying thing, trying to research a topic with one word matching that of a recent news event. So you only ever see news sites.
I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone because it’s really expensive, but for me it’s great, and I save at least one hour a day at work since I don’t waste my time filtering the results from DDG or Google.
It’s subjective of course but I’m happy about it so far.
I tried the trial for two days before I bought in and completely gave up google. Kagi is absolutely amazing and well worth the money, not just because there’s no ads or selling of your data, but because the search results are miles better than any alternative now. I have over 50k searches in my google history and at one point in my career I would average around a hundred searches a day. I know what I need from a search engine and Kagi absolutely gives it to me.
Yeah, I scoffed at the idea of paying. And paying $10/mo. Then I used it. And I keep using it. A lot. And now0 looks like I'm going to be paying for it for a while.
My experience doesn't go past the free trial, but yes, it is very good. It's basically Google-level search quality, but without the removal of features and dropping quality that Google itself experiences in the last few years.
That said, it's still just a regular old search engine. If you used Google 10 years ago, you have a pretty good idea what this feels like. It doesn't really do anything new or revolutionary. It's not a "wow, this is amazing" experience, it's just a "well, this actually works" kind of thing.
Not something I'd pay $10/month for, but if you want to move away from Google without it feeling like a downgrade, it's currently the only real alternative. Bing, DDG (which is just Bing with window dressing), Yandex, BraveSearch are all still quite a bit worse than Google and even Google itself is nowhere near as good as it once was.
Recently I get good result with Ecosia.
Yeah, it's very good. Not having results full of shit like geeksforgeeks or Pinterest is nice, but possible with browser extensions. Being able to influence the rank of different sites, to either bubble up or down in your results is one of the secret killer features
Doesn't Google pay billions to Apple for the top spot? Why would they want to lose that stream of free cash?
To harm a competitors stock prices more than they are paying out
Could be that Apple will acquire DuckDuckGo. A little hasty to presume it I suppose, but Apple has to wonder how much money they are leaving on the table by taking Google’s payments. If Google will pay them more than $9 billion/year just to be default—what does that say about how profitable Apple’s absolutely huge and locked-in base can be?
A Washington post article I was reading yesterday said google pays apple $19 billion this year to be the default browser on iPhones.
There is a big anti trust case against Google right now and this arrangement with apple is one of the topics of interest. If Google loses they could be forced to stop paying.
I mean, it makes sense, DDG already use apple maps for their maps platform.
I started using duck duck go a few months ago and have felt like my search results are a lot more useful since.
The maps function on it sucks though
DDG uses Apple Maps.
that explains that then
The maps it used were a lot worse, so this is a recent improvement
I wish they would use leaflet
Duck duck go sucks for porn I stopped using it a while ago. Until they fix that I'm out.
The man has priorities
Bing image search is surpringly efficient for this
Isn’t it the same search index?
Or piracy
Oddly enough I used DDG once for an artist and actually got results meanwhile Google gave me irrelevant shit
I’ve been using it this way for years. I don’t use google products at all now and don’t miss it.
I've been using duckduckgo for the last month and change and I'm not really a fan. Especially for things here in Japan, it can give really wonky results (today I was looking for the closest post office and searched '\ post office'. It gave me a website to get directions, but no indication of where it might be nor, y'know, even the post office's website). Google has gotten continually worse for me, but this was, in most cases, just barely as good or worse.
To confirm, are you also toggling the Japan region for searches?
I didn't notice that was a thing, but it defaulted to Japan so we're safe there.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Oct 4 (Reuters) - Apple (AAPL.O) held talks with DuckDuckGo to replace Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) Google as the default search engine for the private mode on Apple's Safari browser, the Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the discussions.
The details of the talks are expected to be released later this week, according to the report, after Judge Amit Mehta, overseeing a federal antitrust suit against Google, ruled on Wednesday that he would unseal the testimony of DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg and Apple executive John Giannandrea.
Apple, DuckDuckGo and Google did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice in a landmark U.S. trial argued Google, which has some 90% of the search market, illegally paid $10 billion annually to smartphone makers such as Apple and wireless carriers like AT&T (T.N) and others to be the default in search on their devices in order to stay on top.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified on Monday, saying that tech giants were competing for vast troves of content needed to train artificial intelligence, and complained Google was locking up content with expensive and exclusive deals with publishers.
He added that Microsoft had sought to make its Bing search engine the default on Apple smartphones but was rebuffed.
The original article contains 241 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 11%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
On Safari (iOS), Apple makes it easy to switch. Settings > Safari > Search Engine and select which one you want. I’ve been using DDG not quite a year and at first the change felt a lil jarring, but knowing I’m contributing less to Google’s ad revenue and their long list of privacy violations, I’m comfortable now sticking with DDG. Change isn’t always easy, convenient, or comfortable, but it can be done with just the tiniest bit of effort.
All browsers make it easy. In fact, Chrome on Android is quicker.
Settings > Search Engine > and select which one you want.
Currently you can pick between;
That's not the point at all.
Duck duck go needs a lot of work to replace Google search.
I've used it for years but often I still get the shits and just bring Google up after duck duck go fails to find what I'm looking for.
Huh I'm also a regular DDG user but I never have that experience.
For 9 of 10 search DDG give me what I'm looking for in the top results, for the other time I just add g! to the search and its sends me to google.
For me the direct opposite is true. About two years ago Google stopped giving me any accurate results, feeding me a bunch of semi-related garbage instead. DuckDuckGo feels like the Google of old: results that actually (literally) contain the terms of the query and not much else. I'd hate using the internet without it.
I felt the same way. Lately, though, ddg has been serving unrelated garbage ads in the middle of my searches. I am now looking for something new. Startpage has some decent results so far....
Yeah, have had a similar experience. I find the more specific or niche a question is, the better google is at finding relevant pages. DDG is perfectly fine the rest of the time, though, so I keep it as the default.
I usually forget I'm using it. Exception is for work - I frequently have to specify g! to get Stackoverflow results to show up at the top.
The android app is nice, especially the app tracking blocker. It takes up the VPN connection tho
Did DDG move away from consolidating results from Google and other engines?
Bing now
I tried to switch to DDG as my default search on iOS but my adblocker doesn’t block ads on it but it does on google, so I switched back
DDG has a built-in option to determine whether you want to see ads or not.
I tried to switch but the results were terrible. I ended up on bing which is still inferior to google but better than being google even if it is another behemoth data gathering company. At this point im just trying to stop centralizing who gets all my data don’t lest it’s a bit fragmented.
I've been trying to use DDG but honestly it sucks. I can't imagine Apple switching to it, it would just make things worse for users, who commonly can't figure out how to switch defaults. I think it's just a negotiating point.
Google search has been fundamentally broken for at least two years. When the protests started on Reddit 90% of Google's search results we're broken.
I found this too. After the reddit fiasco, I found DDG to have no downside. The search syntax is a little different (google's is better) but the outputs arent radically different.
What difficulties are you finding with it and are you switching from Google? The results are as custom as Google given they haven't scraped your life history so wondering if that's it? I've been using DDG without any issues. About once every 6 months I struggle to find something so try the Google bang but have never found better results. In fact, I was shocked last time how crap the Google results were, just full of AI generated crap and SEO based crap.
To be honest, DDG is also struggling with that now as it's based on Bing. I have been trying a public searxg but not found it very good so far.
I love DDG and use it as my default, but there's no doubt that its index is shallower and its semantic matching can't compare to Google's. I'm a biogeochemist and spend a lot of time coding in R. Google is just better at surfacing rare science articles/blogs and stackoverflow pages where my query doesn't match exactly, but it is a relevant result. I use DDG for my personal searching and Google for professional searching
I primarily use it. What sucks about it? It isn't as flashy without those little quick answers that Google throws together, but those are garbage a lot of the time anyway imo. Otherwise, I don't really have any issues finding what I need that I can think of
You are not going to get a more constructive criticism from OP.
I use mainly ddg but I have occasionally needed to switch to Google, but it's happening less and less.
But then again with Google you need to frequently add keywords such as discussions or Reddit to find something that in the word's of OP doesn't suck balls.
Only thing I miss is Google shopping sometimes. That actually is really useful when you need a super obscure part that's not available on ebay or Amazon and just sold on three random websites. Google shopping will show them and let you compare prices perfectly.
I find the results suck donkey balls.
Don't agree.
I switched from Google quite recently, as I knew it was hard...
But now I'm mostly not using !g unless for few cache: searches or when I want use few features (sport results, without going to specific websites).
You've to use some search syntax items more as + but otherwise it's quite good and clear to read.
Duck duck go is crap these days, probably since it uses Bing. All I ever get are "7 best ways to..." click bait, probably AI generated "articles".
They should make a deal with Kagi if they had any brains.
Even though im not sure if Kagi could take that amount of traffic right away.
They should make a deal with Kagi if they had any brains.
Oh, okay
Lists critical reason why using Kagi would actually be a really dumb move
lol
Vote for Brave search.
Surprised they dont buy kagi tbh
Thank fuck they didn't
What's a kagi
It’s a search engine with better results than google https://kagi.com
Is ddg any good?
I feel like Bing would just be better at this point.
DDG is great, highly recommended. It reminds me of what Google used to be.
It does show you more relevant results based on your query, withou doing any guessing about what you might have meant by it. That being said, sometimes I use Google to search for something when DDG is giving me bad results. But overall I would recommend, it's muxh more better experience with the results I am seeing. I have tried Bing for a while as well, but it was thinking too much instead of just showing me the results.
The only reason I had to use Google was to search by image. Which is a feature DDG doesn't have sadly.
For specific search, I found perplexity.ai to be much better and faster, it uses AI to scan the websites and give summaries as to why they are relevant to your query.
yep it is quite good
Ddg is Bing with less tracking. I mean, literally it is Bing.
I just switched from ddg (after years of using it across all my devices) to kagi, but ddg is good. The results can be iffy at times, especially on unusual or niche queries, but their bang system lets you forward the query to other engines to see if they have the result you are looking for. In my household where I control and direct the tech, ddg has been the standard for many years for all our devices. I recommend it to everyone who is still using a big-name search engine.
Kagi is fucking amazing.
I've used it for a few months, and in the end I was always using !g
It's just not good enough in a lot of contexts. I'm having a much better time with kagi
It’s okay. If you want something genuinely as good as Google, if not better, Kagi is what you want.
I have been using it exclusively for years. Does its job most of the time and when it doesn't and I include Google results (via bang !g) Google doesn't really find it either.
However, I've opted out of most Google services in parallel, so their model of me probably isn't the best anymore. If in their bubble, their results may still be better (creeps me out though, so I live with non-perfect search).
Ddg results are pretty horrible in my experience. Statpage (google results) and brave search both have better results.
Upvote this question, it's pretty relevant to the issue of whether this would have been good for Apple (no, it would not have been)
DDG is my default search on mobile, but half the time I end up back on Google. Google is better at guessing exactly what I want and giving that content fast, such as the weather, people always ask answers, or quick facts about things that saves me from loading the site underneath the result.
But sometimes I know exactly what I want and Google won't give it to me - because it decided I want something else.
That's where a well built query can work better on DDG. However... DDG is more susceptible to backlink spamming and old school SEO techniques to rank content near the top. So depending on the people behind the search results, some queries are fine and some can still be garbage.
Also for image and video search Google is top.
Strong disagree on Google having a better video/image search. Bing is top there, then Google, then DDG, imo.