Empirical analysis of behavioral advertising finds that surveillance makes ads only 4% more profitable for media companies

So does Firefox.
As of yesterday…

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I really should read those update notes instead of just saying “Sure, fine…”

I don’t take any pleasure in saying this, but as a search engine, DuckDuckGo is awful. And I’m someone who would use them on principle even if they were only fair-to-poor.

Google search results* are good because Google pays a million people to constantly massage and tweak and whisper sweet nothings to their algorithm. I truly don’t believe there can be a good internet search engine without that kind of massive person-power behind it.

* I mean the “naked” results you get in incognito mode, not the personalized stuff. But the personalized stuff really is even more useful, which is part of the problem. It’s not like we have no incentive whatsoever to be complicit in this.

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That’s what I’m thinking. Every day I see examples of cheapening of products and services that make me think, dang they can only be saving a couple pennies by doing that, and get someone up that ladder has probably figured those pennies add up. 4% seems like a lot in that respect.

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They have untargeted ads, you’re probably blocking them :slight_smile:

Mostly tied to keywords.

They also get referral $.

Like if you click on an amazon listing via DDG they get income.

So still ad based just not tracking ads

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Granted, it’s still Wednesday.

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The table posted makes no sense in the context of the post. I don’t know what it means, but the only
numbers that make sense seem to imply that CPM is either 35% or 60% with a cookie than without.

I think that was one of the things they pointed out in the interview @stryxvaria mentioned.

I don’t know about “awful” but I’d guess that, at least 20 percent of the time, I end up putting in the “g!” flag (or whatever) to perform the search on Google (thanx to @MalevolentPixy for that, in another thread where I’m trying to look for something else relevant to this topic)

(…and I couldn’t find it)
A few weeks? months? ago, someone here pointed to an alternative search engine that (IIRC) did a Google search, but from behind a proxy or some such so that your search terms weren’t directly fed to the mothership. Anyway the search results were supposed to be better than DuckDuckGo’s. Now I can’t remember the website…

EDIT: it may or may not have been in that same thread that now I can’t find, but I think someone here suggested that DDG was using Yahoo for its searches (unless otherwise flagged with g! etc.)

It is DDG.

You just put g! in front of your query, but Google can’t trace the search back to you as an individual.

Depending on other settings, they may still be able to track you if you visit any sites, but that’s not due to the search engine, but straight up tracking visitors.

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Someone mentioned some other website (not DDG) that (IIRC) used Google (i.e. without the “g!” or “gi!” etc.) – the results were better than DDG’s right off the bat. Although now I realize I’m making it sound like typing the “g!”, when necessary, is some huge endeavor…

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It’s also been faster than Chrome for a few months now.

The table seems to be for some other purpose, but the delta between the cookie vs no cookie columns is about 4%.

“It’s 4 louder.”

In marketing terms, 4% is a huge amount, not statistical error. 3% engagement is what most of them expect from things like your newspaper stuffers.

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I find Google search to be frelling useless compared to how it was just a scant 10 years ago. GMail has suffered the same fate.

OK, am I taking crazy pills? The only quantities in $ are $1.18 (cookie) vs $.74 (no cookie)? That is 60% more? And the numbers in brackets under them are 1.14 vs 0.84 which is 35% more? Or am I to compare the 1.18 vs 1.14 that are both in the cookie column? That comes out to about 4%, but then the whole thing doesn’t make any sense.

Are you thinking of startpage? They pay google to use their results but claim none of the skeezy tracking follows you round.

You can’t beat Google when it comes to online search. So we’re paying them to use their brilliant search results in order to remove all trackers and logs. The result: The world’s best and most private search engine. Only now you can search without ads following you around, recommending products you’ve already bought. And no more data mining by companies with dubious intentions. We want you to dance like nobody’s watching and search like nobody’s watching.

And then there’s that… :rofl:

It didn’t ring a bell, but when I searched the BBS, I found this comment which I do remember.

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Hi. Yes. I made that comment.

Startpage.com is the search engine that delivers mainly Google search results in privacy. DuckDuckGo delivers mainly Yahoo /Bing search results in privacy.

Startpage and DDG are similar because they both are funded through non-targeted ads.

Let me know if you have any other questions. I appreciate the email ping you sent to alert me to this topic, Gyrofrog!

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