There’s been a huge number of hot takes—mostly on twitter, of course, but elsewhere as well—about Duck Duck Go (DDG) not blocking Microsoft tracking scripts. The hot takes all treat the matter as a betrayal of DDG’s users and express their outrage. The problem is that all the “hot takers” don’t know what they’re talking about—not just metaphorically but actually.
They think they’re talking about DDJ’s search engine but they’re not. They think they’re talking about DDG letting Microsoft tracking scripts into their search results but they’re not. They all assume the non-blocking of Microsoft involves the DDG search engine. It doesn’t. It involves their browser. “Browser?”, you say, “What browser?” Most people didn’t know DDG even has a browser. I certainly didn’t. But they do and that’s what this is all about.
Gabriel Weinberg, founder and CEO of DDG, addresses what’s really going on in this reddit comment. You should read Weinberg’s comment before you form any opinion about the controversy.
When you think about it, DDG not blocking tracking scripts in their search results doesn’t even make sense. After all, the search results are just a bunch of links generated by DDG so how would a tracking script sneak in? Once you follow the link, of course, all bets are off but that has nothing to do with DDG and there’s nothing they can do about what happens on a target site.
Most of the responses to Weinberg’s comment were supportive. Those that weren’t were clearly from people who didn’t want to give up their outrage. There were questions like, “Why would you even be in an agreement with Microsoft?” That’s something that Weinberg answers explicitly in his comment: Indexing the Web is so expensive (about a billion dollars a year) that only Google and Microsoft can afford to do it so every other search engine has to reach a data sharing agreement with one of them. Most of the other non-supportive comments were also from people who obviously didn’t read Weinberg’s comment.
None of this means DDG is perfect—as even Weinberg admits. I’m still upset at them for filtering information about the Ukrainian mess but that doesn’t mean we get to make up things to be angry about. If you’re still mad about what DDG is doing, reread Weinberg’s comment and notice that even with their dispensation to Microsoft, they’re still doing more than the other browsers to combat snooping. And, again, this is in their browser, not search.