DuckDuckGo now supports custom From / To date-range parameters for searches

[Delicieuxz]

Whereas before, the DuckDuckGo internet search-engine would only allow a user to choose how far back to make a search reach, it now supports setting both From and To dates for searches, to create a fully custom search-range. And while it's perhaps a small technical change, it is a very important and impactful one for its usability and promotability.

 

 

    

 

 

 

I'm not sure exactly when this was implemented, but I, and others, have called for it for a long time and I last complained about its absence in DuckDuckGo just one week ago:

On 2/18/2021 at 1:14 AM, Delicieuxz said:

I wish that DuckDuckGo would add a customized date-range search option. I often have to go back to Google's search to dial-in narrow search parameters. DuckDuckGo only does 1 week / 1 month / 1 year, etc from today's date. That isn't useful when wanting to look for something from years ago using search terms that have become, in search engines, more associated with something else in recent years.

 

I found a post here from 3 days ago where the poster said they still didn't have custom date-range options, and I'm guessing they meant full From / To customization, as DDG has had the lone custom From option since as long as I recall using DDG. In that post, the person says they saw a post from 2 months ago claiming there are custom date-range searches in DuckDuckGo. But I think they might have misunderstood this post, which was complaining about the lack of custom From / To date-range searches, while showing screenshots of Google's custom date-range search feature.

 

I think that not having that feature before now will have significantly impacted DuckDuckGo's growth-rate and appearance as a professional replacement for Google's search-engine, because not having that feature made DuckDuckGo often useless for important and hardcore research, and when an engine isn't visible and cited by researchers and in more professional and serious contexts, then there's less influence-spreading for the engine and less reputation of the engine being good getting built.

 

 

 

This feature addition is good news for the promotion of online privacy, as now DuckDuckGo can replace more of Google's functionality and be recommended to more people on that basis, while protecting people's data from being harvested in more situations. And a list of methods to protect your computing privacy is here:

 

On 2/17/2021 at 2:17 AM, Delicieuxz said:

Some methods to reduce the amount of data being stolen from you and used for commercial and manipulative purposes include:

 

- Using DuckDuckGo for web searches. They don't share or store any personal data. DuckDuckGo also has a tracker-blocking privacy plugin for Chrome, FireFox, and Safari, as well as mobile browsers.

 

- Using only an Enterprise or LTSC edition of Windows 10 as they afford for lowering the amount of data Microsoft takes from you beyond what Home and Pro allow. And Microsoft is tracking every mouse-click you make in Windows 10.

 

- Using ProtonMail for you email. It has end-to-end encryption and your inbox is encrypted with a user encryption key so that ProtonMail can't view it, either.

 

- Installing Electronic Frontier Foundation's browser plugin Privacy Badger [2] [3], which blocks a lot of tracking scripts.

 

- Possibly using an ad-blocker to reduce the amount of tracking and advertisement scripts websites can run when you browse their website.

 

- Making use of FireFox browser's built-in Facebook-tracking-blocking feature.

 

- Using your iPhones built-in option to block all tracking by apps.

 

- Setting your DNS resolver to Cloudflare's free 1.1.1.1 service. This prevents your ISP from recording your activity and searches and selling it. Cloudflare doesn't collect or sell any of your data and doesn't record any IPs. Cloudflare also has a mobile app that sets your mobile internet usage to its 1.1.1.1 service. Cloudflare say of their 1.1.1.1 service:

Quote

Here’s the deal - we don’t store client IP addresses never, ever, and we only use query names for things that improve DNS resolver performance (such as prefill all caches based on popular domains in a region and/or after obfuscation, APNIC research).
 

Cloudflare will never store any information in our logs that identifies an end user, and all logs collected by our public resolver will be deleted within 24 hours. We will continue to abide by our privacy policy and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.

 

If you know of additional methods to secure your data and privacy, please share them.

 

[Drama Lama]

Edited February 26, 2021 by Drama Lama

[Delicieuxz]

1 minute ago, Drama Lama said:

 

A ringing endorsement if ever I've seen one. Everybody dump Google for DuckDuckGo NNNOOOOOOWWWW!!!

[Drama Lama]

2 minutes ago, Delicieuxz said:

A ringing endorsement if ever I've seen one. Everybody dump Google for DuckDuckGo NNNOOOOOOWWWW!!!

With every search you make the company plants one duck

 

seriously: DuckDuckGo is a good search engine and alternative to Google 

[RejZoR]

Noice. DuckDuckGo is really improving. I've been using it for years now and it has served me really well. Only issue I really had was absolutely broken and useless region based searching which had no clue what my country even is. I've picked Slovenia and got results from anything but. Now, it still gives some weird results for Serbia or Poland for god knows what reason, but I at least get a lot of stuff from my actual country which didn't exist before. And now we get time based search. Cool.

[BuckGup]

I don't trust DuckDuckGo anymore. It's better than Google but they are definitely selling your data still. 

[Drama Lama]

11 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

I don't trust DuckDuckGo anymore. It's better than Google but they are definitely selling your data still. 

Why would they?

Their whole concept of their business is based on not doing things like that.

could you please explain what you mean? ( I‘m curious )

[piratemonkey]

13 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

I don't trust DuckDuckGo anymore. It's better than Google but they are definitely selling your data still. 

You have any proof to back up your claims? I genuinely want to know, cuz if they do I definitely will think before recommending it.

[Spindel]

I’ve been using DDG full time for searches for at least 5 years by now...

 

...and not once has I missed this feature  

[Delicieuxz]

I'd also like to hear any information alleging that DuckDuckGo sells user data.

 

In this post by DuckDuckGo's CEO, last updated January 2021, he says:

Quote

DuckDuckGo has been a profitable company since 2014 without storing or sharing any personal information on people using our search engine. As we like to say, what you search on DuckDuckGo is private, even from us! We’re proud to have a business model for a web-based business that’s profitable without making your personal information the product. I’m happy to tell you all about how we make it work (and how other companies can, too).

Though first, if you’re unfamiliar with DuckDuckGo, we're the Internet privacy company for everyone who's had enough of hidden online tracking and wants to take back their privacy now. For over a decade, we've built products, created new technology, and worked with policymakers to make online privacy simple and accessible for all. Every day, millions of people rely on our free all-in-one solution (private search engine, tracker blocker, mobile browser) to stay private online.

 

Quote

It’s actually a big myth that search engines need to track your personal search history to make money or deliver quality search results. Almost all of the money search engines make (including Google) is based on the keywords you type in, without knowing anything about you, including your search history or the seemingly endless amounts of additional data points they have collected about registered and non-registered users alike.
...
This keyword-based advertising is our primary business model. When you search on DuckDuckGo, we can show you an ad based on the keywords you type in. That’s it. And it works. Our privacy policy, in a nutshell, is to not collect or share any personal information at all. Every time you search on DuckDuckGo it is as if you were there for the first time – anonymous.

 

Quote

Google also makes most of their money via this same type of keyword-based advertising that doesn’t require any search-history tracking.

 

So why do they track it all then? Because Google is not really a search company; they are an advertising company. On Google, your searches are tracked, mined, and packaged up into a data profile for advertisers to follow you around the Internet through intrusive and annoying ever-present banner ads, using Google’s massive ad networks, embedded across millions of sites and apps.

 

Quote

As mentioned, DuckDuckGo is profitable based mostly on keyword-based search ads, though we have always been on the search for other ways to anonymously make money so that we can reduce the dependence on advertising. The only other way we’ve found so far, which currently accounts for a much smaller portion of our revenue, is non-tracking affiliate partnerships with Amazon and eBay.

 

When you visit those sites through DuckDuckGo, including when using !bangs, and subsequently make a purchase, we receive a small commission. This mechanism operates anonymously and there is no personally identifiable information exchanged between us and Amazon or eBay. These partnerships also don't affect the ranking of search results. The reason we can do this in an anonymous way with Amazon and eBay, though not with other retailers, is because Amazon and eBay run their own affiliate networks.

 

[BuckGup]

28 minutes ago, Drama Lama said:

Why would they?

Their whole concept of their business is based on not doing things like that.

could you please explain what you mean? ( I‘m curious )

 

26 minutes ago, piratemonkey said:

You have any proof to back up your claims? I genuinely want to know, cuz if they do I definitely will think before recommending it.

It's pure speculation on my part based on their business model and how popular it is so take everything with a grain of salt. Their only means of revenue is through affiliate links and donations. Which honestly would probably work well back when it first came out and they had under 5 employees. But now they have 124 employees and receive over 100 million searches a day. I find it increasingly hard to believe they can turn profits based on affiliate links only. But hey maybe I'm wrong and people are buying shit like crazy through the ads they see on DuckDuckGo

[Drama Lama]

2 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

 

It's pure speculation on my part based on their business model and how popular it is so take everything with a grain of salt. Their only means of revenue is through affiliate links and donations. Which honestly would probably work well back when it first came out and they had under 5 employees. But now they have 124 employees and receive over 100 million searches a day. I find it increasingly hard to believe they can turn profits based on affiliate links only. But hey maybe I'm wrong and people are buying shit like crazy through the ads they see on DuckDuckGo

In the early days Google relied on a similar business model like DuckDuckGo ( selling the first ( or second or third ) search result for certain keywords).

[DeScruff]

This is great! always handy when you wanna search for something that happened years ago but all the results are of something similar that happened recently.
You might not remember when exactly the thing you are looking for happened, but filtering out results that happened after more recent event certainly helps.
 

[Quackers101]

it's hopefully getting better, but google and not just their search engine by themselves is always for me going to be used in one way or another. and how google is nearly everywhere.

[Taf the Ghost]

DDG didn't actually have to get that good. Google Search has gotten so bad that even competent search was enough to tip me over to use them full time ages ago.

[RejZoR]

7 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

DDG didn't actually have to get that good. Google Search has gotten so bad that even competent search was enough to tip me over to use them full time ages ago.

Biggest problem is that Google is so ingrained into everyone's mindset they just don't know anything else and are too afraid to even give anything else a try even though it would serve them just as well. Even the famed "google it" which I purposely stopped using it and replaced it with "just search for it online" or "search online".

 

I also don't believe stuff people say how they just couldn't find anything with non-Google search engines. And then I see 90% of search engine users who type in complete correct URL into a search engine, get a result of a webpage they already typed in correctly and proceed to the webpage they could have gotten to without these ridiculous nonsensical steps. And most of them don't even know how to form correct search terms to get correct results. And I'm not even talking about fancy stuff like exclusion of terms using minus prefix in front of string to exclude. Literally just raw words to search for.

[Mark Kaine]

Cool. But go doesn't find my p0rn any good mods so it's not really an option (I always realize this after feeling rebellious and trying it for a day or so lol) 

 

2 hours ago, Delicieuxz said:

It’s actually a big myth that search engines need to track your personal search history to make money or deliver quality search results

And now I know why... 

 

 

They need some AI that learns search patterns and finds the stuff the user is actually looking for more easily, and especially faster (which takes mysteriously no time at all on Google) yet with DDG I always have the feeling I'm in a 'search loop cycle' and it always only finds the most mundane stuff which I have z e r o interest in.

[Taf the Ghost]

49 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Biggest problem is that Google is so ingrained into everyone's mindset they just don't know anything else and are too afraid to even give anything else a try even though it would serve them just as well. Even the famed "google it" which I purposely stopped using it and replaced it with "just search for it online" or "search online".

 

I also don't believe stuff people say how they just couldn't find anything with non-Google search engines. And then I see 90% of search engine users who type in complete correct URL into a search engine, get a result of a webpage they already typed in correctly and proceed to the webpage they could have gotten to without these ridiculous nonsensical steps. And most of them don't even know how to form correct search terms to get correct results. And I'm not even talking about fancy stuff like exclusion of terms using minus prefix in front of string to exclude. Literally just raw words to search for.

Google's fundamental problem is that the core design of the algo was figured out by others by 2010. So to keep it from being completely controlled by SEO groups, they had to keep making it worse. Fundamentally, it was always based around "what did other people click when they searched something similar?", so as more used it, it became better. Then they had to make it worse because it became a game of manipulation. Made great room for other search engines to catch up.

[BuckGup]

3 hours ago, Drama Lama said:

In the early days Google relied on a similar business model like DuckDuckGo ( selling the first ( or second or third ) search result for certain keywords).

That's different as they are selling the data that is about you. An affiliate link is different