REPOST: Search Engine DuckDuckGo Is Taking On Google By Doing The One Thing They Won't Do

The article below contains snippets from an interview with DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg about his primary aims and motivations behind the search engine company.

Image Source: businessinsider.com

DuckDuckGo bills itself as "the search engine that doesn't track you". After the revelations in the US National Security Agency files, that sounds tempting.

Named after the playground game duck duck goose, the site is not just banking on the support of people paranoid about GCHQ and the NSA. Its founder, Gabriel Weinberg, argues that privacy makes the web search better, not worse. Since it doesn't store your previous searches, it does not and cannot present personalized search results. That frees users from the filter bubble – the fear that, as search results are increasingly personalized, they are less likely to be presented with information that challenges their existing ideas.

It also means that DuckDuckGo is forced to keep its focus purely on search. With no stores or data to tap, it cannot become an advertising behemoth, it has no motivation to start trying to build a social network and it doesn't get anything out of scanning your emails to create a personal profile.

Having answered one billion queries in 2013 alone, DuckDuckGo is on the rise. We asked Weinberg about his website's journey.

Why did you set up DuckDuckGo in 2008?

DuckDuckGo didn't come out of any real direct motivation to start a search engine. I had come off my last company in 2006, [The Names Database, a social network that Weinberg sold for $10m], and I was focused on a bunch of personal projects.

One was fighting spam in search results. There were a lot of sites that were just obviously spam in Google at the time, but they seemed pretty easy to identify. Another was crowdsourced data. I found myself going to Wikipedia and IMDB a lot, sites that used crowdsourced data, where you just get answers. The third leg was that I went to this stained-glass class, where they handed out a list of links that were the best places to go for more information on stained-glass production. They didn't match the Google search results. So I started a third project about getting the links out of people's heads, to find out where the best stuff was.

DuckDuckGo is based in the small town of Paoli, Pennsylvania. How much do you think that the location puts you outside the general Silicon Valley milieu?

Yeah, we don't feel connected to that scene. I'm not actually from here, interestingly enough. My wife and I picked here together to move to because we thought it would be a good place to raise a family and for other, deeper reasons that don't make sense to people outside the US. I think anyone in a similar position in Silicon Valley would have raised a ton more money a ton earlier. But that hasn't been our focus. And also, just look at how we've got 75% remote workers. That's a very non-Silicon Valley thing to do. Normally you hire the best engineers that you can out of Ivy League schools and bring them all in one place so you can get them in the company.

After all these years, it seems as if people are finally talking about privacy …

Yes, I do think that's fair. I don't think it's a fad. One of the big things people have noticed in the last year is the ads that follow them around the internet and that's perhaps the most visible notion of this new tracking mindset that most companies are adopting. Those trends are not disappearing. More tracking on the internet, more surveillance, so I think as people find out about it they're going to be wanting to opt out in some percentage.

When you started, your sole aim was to build a better search engine. When did you decide that privacy was crucial to that?

Instant answers and spam filtering were really the initial focus there and still are in terms of product differentiation. But very quickly after that – I would have done it from the beginning had I actually thought about it, but I hadn't – was privacy.

The data that you share with your search engine is the most personal data. Because you don't hold back with your search engine. You don't think about it in that context. You think "oh, I've got a financial problem … just type it in!" And so, that search history is really personal.

It has [also] increasingly been used for marketing, it is available to subpoena and, as we know from the last year, it's also available through other hidden means for surveillance. Most money a search engine makes comes from showing an ad for something commercial like a car or shoes when users search for them, and it doesn't impact that business model to not track.

Why not just anonymise the data you collect, rather than offer totally incognito searches?

The reality shows that every time someone had tried to anonymise data, it's been a failure. As long as you can tie searches together and you keep any shred of the information, any personal information that can tie things back to you, then I think it's not truly private.

Are you against tracking on a personal level, or is this just business?

No, I do have a philosophical opposition. I think of it as more privacy policy than general. I think they should be set up to be the minimal collection as needed, as opposed to the maximal collection possible.

The other way to look at that is I think they should have a quid pro quo, which is "you're giving up this particular piece of personal information and you're getting this benefit in return", as opposed to the current status quo, which is "we will collect anything we can and not tell you what the benefits are", just say, in general, "sure, you'll benefit from this".

I think that is the key difference. And you've seen some companies start to move to this direction, but very slowly.

Is it possible to make a good search engine without collecting Google levels of data?

I believe you can switch to us today, and you'll be fine. And people are. And you can have a better experience! But also, if you look at your Google searches and what's coming up, really the amount that they're using your search history to change the search results is minimal. They are not really using that data currently to improve your search results in any significant way – as far as we can tell. They're using it for other things. They're using it to track you across the ad network.

Does that mean you've backed off a bit in your fight against personalised searches?

We've not backed off! I guess to restate my case I don't think that personal data, that personalization, has been very useful.The case that everyone mentions is when, say, you type in the weather or you type in pizza and you want local weather or a local pizza place.

Do people eat pizza in the UK?

Yeah.

I figured so. So, we can do that in our instant answer box – using your location on the fly, and not store it – and not change the actual link results. So I think most of what people want that they call personalization is really localization and we can do that without tracking people.

You've said before that tracking might be used to charge people more if their profiles reveal they have a lot of money. Is that something you can really see happening, or is it a worst-case scenario?

It's real, and it already is happening, and will be increased. My general view is that if information is out there that can lead companies to improve their profits, then they will do so unless it's regulated against.

So I definitely think it's out there, I think people just don't know that it exists yet.

MySearchResults is an intuitive Internet portal that aggregates results from major search engines. Discover a better way to search the Web by clicking here.

REPOST: 2029: The year when robots will have the power to outsmart their makers

Ray Kurzweil, Google’s director of engineering, envisions a future where computers could outsmart humans, at least in terms of natural language understanding. The Guardian keeps tabs on his vision called “the singularity” and how he’s making the concept a reality for the search engine behemoth.

 

Image Source: theguardiancom

Computers will be cleverer than humans by 2029, according to Ray Kurzweil, Google's director of engineering.

The entrepreneur and futurologist has predicted that in 15 years' time computers will be more intelligent than we are and will be able to understand what we say, learn from experience, make jokes, tell stories and even flirt.

Kurzweil, 66, who is considered by some to be the world's leading artificial intelligence (AI) visionary, is recognised by technologists for popularising the idea of "the singularity" – the moment in the future when men and machines will supposedly converge. Google hired him at the end of 2012 to work on the company's next breakthrough: an artificially intelligent search engine that knows us better than we know ourselves.

In an interview in today's Observer New Review, Kurzweil says that the company hasn't given him a particular set of instructions, apart from helping to bring natural language understanding to Google.

"My project is ultimately to base search on really understanding what the language means," he said. "When you write an article, you're not creating an interesting collection of words. You have something to say and Google is devoted to intelligently organising and processing the world's information.

"The message in your article is information, and the computers are not picking up on that. So we would want them to read everything on the web and every page of every book, then be able to engage in intelligent dialogue with the user to be able to answer their questions."

Kurzweil's prediction comes hot on the tail of revelations that Google is in the throes of assembling the greatest artificial intelligence laboratory on Earth. The company has bought several machine-learning and robotics companies, including Boston Dynamics, the firm that produces lifelike military robots, for an undisclosed sum; and the smart thermostat maker, Nest Labs, for $3.2bn (£1.9bn).

This month it bought the cutting-edge British artificial intelligence startup DeepMind for £242m and hired Geoffrey Hinton, a British computer scientist and the world's leading expert on neural networks.

Kurzweil is known for inventing devices that have changed the world – the first flatbed scanner, the first computer program that could recognise a typeface, and the first text-to-speech synthesiser. In 1990 he predicted that a computer would defeat a world chess champion by 1998 (in 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov), and he predicted the future prominence of the world wide web at a time when it was only an obscure system that was used by a few academics.

For years he has been saying that the Turing test – the moment at which a computer will exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human – will be passed in 2029. "Today, I'm pretty much at the median of what AI experts think and the public is kind of with them," he adds. "The public has seen things like Siri [the iPhone's voice-recognition technology], where you talk to a computer. They've seen the Google self-driving cars. My views are not radical any more."

Kurzweil had been working with Google's co-founder, Larry Page, on special projects over several years until Page offered him a job. "I'd been having ongoing conversations with him about artificial intelligence and what Google is doing and what I was trying to do," he notes.

"And basically he said, 'Do it here. We'll give you the independence you've had with your own company, but you'll have these Google-scale resources.'"

In 2009 Kurzweil co-founded the Singularity University, partly funded by Google, an unaccredited graduate school devoted to his ideas and the aim of exploring exponential technologies.

Tech visionaries at MySearchResults are devoted to Kurzweil’s idea of empowering search engines with the capability to engage an intelligent dialogue with users. Click here to learn how the Web search aggregator is making great strides toward a smarter and more streamlined approach to online searching.

REPOST: 4 simple but effective remarketing tips

Bethany Bay shares with Search Engine Journal some of the ways that site owners and Web marketers can use remarketing options to their advantage.

I can still remember when Google announced the ability to remarket to people on the Content Network. Since then, remarketing has grown exponentially and become an important part of any advertiser’s digital marketing strategy. Below are four quick tips you may or may not be using that I’ve found effective in managing and testing remarketing campaigns.

1. Stack audiences to have different frequencies in the same campaign.
Impression frequency caps are set at the campaign level, but you can create descending frequencies for the same audience in a single campaign. If you want to show ads more often to people who recently visited your site and less frequently as more time passes, you can do this by creating what I like to call stacked audiences.

Let’s say you want to target people 60 days after they visit your site but you want to show ads to them more often in the first week, less often for the rest of the first month and even less often the second month. You can make this happen by creating the three audiences below and putting each in its own ad group in your campaign.

All visitors 7 days
All visitors 30 days
All visitors 60 days
Separate ad groups are necessary because you can’t set frequency limits per audience. Next, set frequency per ad group for the number of times per day/week/month you want your ad to show. For this example I’m going to set it at 10 times per week. Now let’s see how this will work: 

Image Source: www.searchenginejournal.com

Using this method, anyone who visited the site in the first 7 days could actually be impressed 30 times in the first week. This is because any person who has visited your site in the last 7 days has also visited your site in the last 30 and 60 days. They’ll be a member of all three audiences and therefore all 3 ad groups, each of which has a frequency cap of 10 impressions/week.

2. Segment audiences to test duration.
I get asked a lot during AdWords trainings what the best duration is for remarketing and the answer I always give, and attendees hate, is “it depends.” It depends on many factors that are specific to each client and you’ll never know until you test. Other times, a client has a duration number in mind but no data to back it up. Because of this, I like to segment audiences into shorter time frames to get a better idea of performance by duration.

Unlike the strategy above, you’ll want to create audiences using custom combinations so that each visitor would only be in one remarketing list.

Image Source: www.searchenginejournal.com

Now you’ll be able to look at CTR, Conv. Rate, or PPI to determine how performance varies for each group. This is also a good way to test different messaging by duration.

3. Put duration numbers in your list names.
This is a simple, but valuable tip that I only learned through being annoyed. Make sure you put your remarketing list duration in the list name because you won’t be able to see it if you add an audience to your campaign from the Display network tab instead of the Shared Library.

Image Source: www.searchenginejournal.com

4. Test campaign frequency caps.
Frequency is something people too often set and forget. Just like any other element in your AdWords campaign, you want to test test test! Although I find the Reach and Frequency report still a little limiting in the interface, I do use them to analyze how changes in frequency cap affect performance. I quickly analyze the data by pulling it into a pivot table and comparing it to past frequency changes.

Besides this report, I’ll also look at either Multi-channel funnel reports in GA or the Search Funnel columns in AdWords to look at changes in assisted conversions.

There you have it. Four simple remarketing tips to help improve performance for your campaigns. Let me know what other great tips are out there in the comments below!

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