DuckDuckGo is now my default search engine. Seriously!

DuckDuckGo - a better search engine?

It sounds funny to admit this, but I’m excited about a new search engine.

It’s called DuckDuckGo, and it recently had its first day handling over a million searches.

I think that’s pretty awesome. Most people would say that there isn’t any room left for innovation in search, with Google long ago having achieved dominance in the marketplace (The last nascent search engine that garnered media attention, Cuil, was an abject failure).

But DuckDuckGo has two key advantages -- from a user perspective -- over Google. The whole premise of the upstart is that it won’t track or bubble you.

In other words, DuckDuckGo takes privacy seriously, and they don’t attempt to personalize your search based on history or other identifiers -- the whole concept of Eli Pariser’s Filter Bubble Problem.

It’s a clean, simple, impartial search (kind of a hybrid based on search APIs from major sites like Yahoo, Wolfram|Alpha, and Bing) that has been filtered for SEO spam and is private -- it won’t send your searches or computer profile to third parties as Google does. Not to mention it’s improving all the time feature-wise.

Gabriel Weinberg,
DuckDuckGo’s motive force

And yes, it’s legit -- with coverage in WIRED, Time, and other major publications.

Put together by Gabriel Weinberg, the site also features many cool and powerful techie shortcuts that let you rapidly search specific sites, or using other engines -- for example, you can type !w to search Wikipedia -- along with many other goodies.

There are some drawbacks, as numerous observers have noted. DuckDuckGo can be a bit weak on the following:

• Searches where there’s a recency element
• foreign language searches
• speed
• it has a silly name

I like the fact that results are fairly uncluttered. You may not realize it -- until you try something else -- but Google searches have become a wasteland of distraction and advertising. Google’s inescapable new privacy policy allowing them to link together and share what you do across all their sites is another factor for consideration.

Hopefully, DuckDuckGo will prod Google to improve their own approach. Fred Wilson (the noted venture capitalist and an investor in DDG) puts it like this: “Best case, DDG is to Google what Firefox was to IE.”

Bottom line, I’ve decided to live with DuckDuckGo for a while, as my default search engine. We’ll see how that goes!

Check it out -- DuckDuckGo (You can also use ddg.gg for less typing)!

See Also...
Eli Pariser's Filter Bubble Problem
Gabriel Weinberg discusses the premises behind DuckDuckGo
Stop Facebook from tracking you, with Disconnect
How to Opt-Out from LinkedIn Social Ads


Spread the word about DuckDuckGo -- please share this post.

Paul Adams' Real Life Social Network

Google+, the new online social hub

There have been a lot of recent discussions regarding the release of Google+, the new information sharing service from the feverish mandarins of Mountain View.

Naturally, it has drawn a lot of comparisons to the gorilla in the social networking space, Facebook. Pundits and analysts are wondering how it will impact other tools like Skype, Twitter, and Tumblr.

To understand how these emerging services are struggling to cope with modeling our relationships and the accompanying flows of information, it is instructive to review Paul Adams' Real Life Social Network slideshow.

Paul Adams was formerly on the Google user experience team, and now works for Facebook. (When asked what he thought about Google+, Adams wrote "Seeing Google+ in public is like bumping into an ex-girlfriend.") Although Andy Hertzfeld is widely credited for his interaction design and implementation work on the Circles editor (sharing is controlled within Google+ using the concept of social circles), he inherited the model from Adams, according to TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsis.

Adams explores at length the complexities of managing multiple independent groups of friends, strong vs weak vs temporary ties, the Dunbar number, influence, and the role of multiple identities in self-representation. He also throws in a discussion of privacy. It turns out there are many subtle and multi-dimensional challenges of modelling real-world relationships.

While Adams criticizes Facebook's broad default sharing approach, I rather enjoy the unpredictable confluence of my different social groups. I view the increased granular control over information provided by Google+ with ambivalence -- even though I know this attitude is problematic.

Check out Adams' slideshow:

The Real Life Social Network v2

Amusingly,  I found that my first 24 hours of activity on Google+ mostly consisted of replicating my existing Facebook and Twitter lists (Arguably the Circles functionality already existed in Facebook via lists, but the latter interface is awkward and inconvenient to use).

I found the naming choice of 'Circles' to be rich in unintended meaning. It immediately made me think of Eli Pariser's Filter Bubble. When I judiciously choose how my information is shared and retrieved, instead of ingesting, and disseminating it across a variety of sources -- and when everyone else does this too -- aren't we contributing to Pariser's problem? Aren't we trapping ourselves by design into bubbles of self-interested information? Is this the end of serendipity?

I really like the integration with the other products in the Google platform; I think this integration will give Google+ a much greater uptake than the ill-fated Wave or the annoying Buzz releases -- Google+ ties everything together. The next piece of functionality I'd like to see -- though I'm not sure how likely it is to come about -- is an integration of the flow with external sources, so I can arbitrarily choose to post on Google+, or Facebook, or Twitter, or some arbitrary combination of channels...

Adams' book on the subject (presumably drawn from the same materials as the slideshow) Social Circles: How offline relationships influence online behavior and what it means for design and marketing (Voices That Matter), is due to be published in August.

UPDATE
Apparently Google is legally preventing Adams from publishing the book even though "The book contains no proprietary information, it is based almost entirely on research from 3rd parties (mostly universities) and any Google research referenced is already in the public domain."

Very interesting! He's working on a new work called 'Grouped'. We'll see how that turns out.

Eli Pariser's Filter Bubble Problem

Eli Pariser's superb TEDtalk lecture on 'The Filter Bubble' has already been circulating widely, but it's well worth passing along again.

In his talk (see video below), Pariser discusses how increasingly the major services that provide information to us on the internet are invisibly, algorithmically filtering and shaping the content we see. Google, for example, allegedly uses 57 signals to personally tailor your search results -- even if you aren't logged in. Have you ever noticed how Facebook, by default, only shows activity in your News Feed from friends you interact with most?

Personalization wraps us in an isolating bubble of information specifically aligned to our tastes. It sounds logical, even appealing, but we risk losing serendipitous exposure to new perspectives and ideas that challenge us. We never get to see what gets filtered out. We wind up viewing only what (the algorithms conclude) we want to see, not necessarily what we need to see.

Algorithmic curation needs to be transparent enough, Pariser argues, so that we can consciously exert a measure of control over the filtering process. Mere relevance is insufficient. A good, rich flow of information introduces us to uncomfortable ideas, and new people -- and is critical for democracy.

I recommend viewing the talk; it's not long and Pariser is an engaging speaker. I'm definitely going to check out his supporting book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, which presumably examines the issue in greater detail.

What do you think about the Filter Bubble? Are you content with what you see on the internet? As we grapple to deal with the unfathomably large sets of data and information streams generated by our modern age, some degree of filtering is essential for us to make sense of it all. This ongoing tension will prove critical in terms of shaping how we see, understand, and interact with the world at large.

Watch Pariser's TEDtalk: