Partnership with DuckDuckGo?

[Jaroslav Reznik]

----- Original Message -----
> Hi,
> 
> DuckDuckGo is an alternative to Google and Bing that, while not
> really
> open source, uses open source components, donates 10% of their
> profits
> to open source projects, and is of course built on free software:
> 
> http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216390-open-source

Sounds really interesting! I like it and I have to check it ;-) Actually
I was looking for some more open minded people search engine.

> So how does that make them different from say Google? Well, they are
> extremely committed to user privacy and don't track users or
> otherwise
> collect or retain personal information about them:
> 
> https://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html
> 
> I recently came across an article that mentioned LinuxMint now ships
> with DuckDuckGo configured:
> 
> http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1884
> 
> I don't know if shipping with DuckDuckGo configured in our browsers
> by
> default is a good idea or not, but it would be nice if we could ship
> with it as an option. At least for Firefox, there's already a search
> engine plugin written for it. Certainly their stances on user privacy
> seem more in-line with our own.

I like the idea. I'll take a look what I can do for Arora, Konqueror
and Rekonq and let you guys know. Don't want to enforce it as a strict
rule on other browsers maintainers but would be great to have consistent
search results.

One thing I'm worried about - how's non-english search results quality?
In Czech Republic we're very specific market - there's one of a very
few local search site that can compete with Google. And it provided 
very good results for Czech language (they specialize on it). Google
just sucked. But they entered Czech market and implemented support for
our language. Now I don't see reason to use seznam.cz for Czech pages,
and Google for English. Just a lot of people are still used to use it.

Would be great to collect some info about it before we switch. As it 
could hit quite a lot of people. Or another possibility - set the
default search engine based on locales if there's known better local
search engine? But it again needs some date and some people would not
be ok with this change :( 

> We've also fielded some criticism I think for using Google as the
> start.fedoraproject.org search engine. DuckDuckGo might be a
> friendlier
> alternative for start.fpo.
> 
> Does this make sense? Would it be appropriate to file a ticket with
> FESCO on including them by default and with the websites team to
> consider using DDG for start.fpo? Or is it not enough benefit?

Do we have any agreement with Google on using it as start page? Something
like Mozilla has? Would it be possible with DDG?

> I was interested in hearing folks weigh in here.

I like the idea, if DDG can provide good non-english results, I'm +1.
Thanks for head up.

Jaroslav

> Thanks,
> ~m
> 
> 
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