Partnership with DuckDuckGo?

[Peter Larsen]

On Mon, 2012-01-09 at 18:31 -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote: 
> 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

Personally I would be a bit hesitant. A few months ago the big news I
was following was how anti-open source duck-duck-go was - several
searched was straight out parallel to what bing returned. I've tried to
use duck-duck-go a bit but haven't been too happy with it - that said, I
rarely saw the anti-open source evidence myself - but I did see it
posted on several sites that produced screendumps to document it:

http://www.muktware.com/news/3012

http://digg.com/newsbar/Technology/are_duckduckgo_s_bing_ties_a_problem_for_linux_mint

Hopefully this is not true but it did make me go cold on the idea of
trying it as an alternative to my "trusted" google.

> 
> 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

Yes - but this also caused a lot of ruckus because of the above issue
(see above link from digg/pcworld).

> 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.

Does Fedora package the Firefox with search-engine setup that is
different from that of the default out of mozilla? If so, while I am not
a fan of DuckDuckGo, I think it should be included there. I don't think
a partnership makes much sense though.

> 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?
> 
> I was interested in hearing folks weigh in here.

While I love alternatives to google - I put being open-source friendly
first. If DuckDuckGo turns out not to be anti-open source, just
disregard me little rant. I just wanted to throw this into the mix.

-- 
Best Regards
  Peter Larsen

Wise words of the day:
oh okay. my mistake.

Yafcot:atj(*),

mark

* Yet another fool coming over this: according to joey
	-- mark at mail.novare.net
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