Duck Duck Go as a Privacy Conscious Google Alternative
April 26, 2016
Those frustrated with Google may have an alternative. Going over to the duck side: A week with Duck Duck Go from Search Engine Watch shares a thorough first-hand account of using Duck Duck Go for a week. User privacy protection seems to be the hallmark of the search service and there is even an option to enable Tor in its mobile app. Features are comparable, such as one designed to compete with Google’s Knowledge Graph called Instant Answers. As an open source product, Instant Answers is built up by community contributions. As far as seamless, intuitive search, the post concludes,
“The question is, am I indignant enough about Google’s knowledge of my browsing habits (and everyone else’s that feed its all-knowing algorithms) to trade the convenience of instantly finding what I’m after for that extra measure of privacy online? My assessment of DuckDuckGo after spending a week in the pond is that it’s a search engine for the long term. To get the most out of using it, you have to make a conscious change in your online habits, rather than just expecting to switch one search engine for another and get the same results.”
Will a majority of users replace “Googling” with “Ducking” anytime soon? Time will tell, and it will be an interesting saga to see unfold. I suppose we could track the evolution on Knowledge Graph and Instant Answers to see the competing narratives unfold.
Megan Feil, April 26, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Digging for a Direction of Alphabet Google
April 21, 2016
Is Google trying to emulate BAE System‘s NetReveal, IBM i2, and systems from Palantir? Looking back at an older article from Search Engine Watch, How the Semantic Web Changes Everything for Search may provide insight. Then, Knowledge Graph had launched, and along with it came a wave of communications generating buzz about a new era of search moving from string-based queries to a semantic approach, organizing by “things”. The write-up explains,
“The cornerstone of any march to a semantic future is the organization of data and in recent years Google has worked hard in the acquisition space to help ensure that they have both the structure and the data in place to begin creating “entities”. In buying Wavii, a natural language processing business, and Waze, a business with reams of data on local traffic and by plugging into the CIA World Factbook, Freebase and Wikipedia and other information sources, Google has begun delivering in-search info on people, places and things.”
This article mentioned Knowledge Graph’s implication for Google to deliver strengthened and more relevant advertising with this semantic approach. Even today, we see the Alphabet Google thing continuing to shift from search to other interesting information access functions in order to sell ads.
Megan Feil, April 21, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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