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: Google promises to block web searches for child abuse images

Several months of discussion and pressure resulted to Google and Microsoft blocking Internet searches related to child abuse following the trials of two criminals. The Huffington Post has the report.

Internet searches for child abuse images will be blocked for the first time by Microsoft and Google after months of mounting pressure.

New software is to be introduced that will automatically block 100,000 "unambiguous" search terms which lead to illegal content, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt told the Daily Mail.

Prime Minister David Cameron hailed the decision by the two internet giants as "significant progress" after the companies had insisted that it "couldn't be done, shouldn't be done".

The restrictions will be launched in the UK first, before being expanded to other English-speaking countries and 158 other languages in the next six months.

A further 13,000 search terms linked with child sex abuse will flash up with warnings from Google and charities warning the user that the content could be illegal and pointing them towards help.

Mr Cameron told the newspaper that child protection experts drew up the list of unique search terms which would undoubtedly lead to sex abuse images and videos.

"If you used these you were looking for child abuse images online," he said.

"At the time, Google and Microsoft - who cover 95% of the market - said blocking search results couldn't be done, that it shouldn't be done.

"They argued that it was against the very principle of the internet and search engines to block material, even if there was no doubt that some of the search terms being used by paedophiles were abhorrent in a modern society.

"I did not accept that then and I do not accept that now."

Image Source: www.huffingtonpost.co.uk

Calls for the internet companies to take action against searching for illegal content reached boiling point following the trials of child killers Mark Bridger and Stuart Hazel earlier this year.

Bridger, who murdered five-year-old April Jones, and Hazel, who killed 12-year-old Tia Sharp, both used the internet to search for child abuse images before the killings.

Mr Cameron told the newspaper: "We learnt from cases like the murder of Tia Sharp and April Jones that people will often start accessing extreme material via a simple search in one of the mainstream engines."

Mr Schmidt said Google has been working with Microsoft, which owns the Bing search engine, and law enforcement agencies since the summer following strong warnings from the Government to take action.

"We've listened, and in the last three months put more than 200 people to work developing new, state-of-the-art technology to tackle the problem," he said.

"We've fine tuned Google Search to prevent links to child sexual abuse material from appearing in our results.

"While no algorithm (instructions for software) is perfect - and Google cannot prevent paedophiles adding new images to the web - these changes have cleared up the results for over 100,000 queries that might be related to the sexual abuse of kids."

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