There are clearly a lot of DDG fans here on HackerNews, but it hasn't yet broken out into the mainstream. That said, providing a great search engine (I took the DDG Challenge -- tried it as my default search for a week -- and I'm still using it months later) is step one.
Beyond that, explaining things like this in plain English for people who don't normally think about things like search privacy are doing a great service for DDG.
Yes but my anecdotal evidence suggests average people really don't care at all. It seems like only technically oriented people concern themselves with privacy issues.
It is my impression that they do care but they don’t know what to do about it. They are overwhelmed.
Many see the news reports about Google and Facebook and are genuinely concerned yet unable to understand the technical details that would allow them to make informed decisions about what to do. They feel discomfort and would be very happy if you explained to them in plain native_language what happens and why.
I wouldn’t expect very many people to be all that concerned if you told them what kind of data Google collects – but they would be more than happy to get rid of the discomfort.
I don't think it's true that only technical people concern themselves with these things. Only a small but overly vocal subset of technical people do...
I'm technical, and I couldn't care less about search security/privacy.
The page screams out to me "solving a problem that doesn't exist". Why do I care that Amazon knows that I searched google for "shoes"??? Surely that's useful info to pass on to Amazon. In what instance would I care? I can't think of any...
The way a startup will win against Google is by doing what Google did 10 years ago. Give users better, clearer, faster, more streamlined results.
Whilst Google is chasing silliness like 'real time update results' - WTF do I care what people are saying on twitter? - a startup can stick to what people actually want - clean search results.
Pandering to an extremely small niche of privacy freakouts, I don't think is a scalable strategy.
+1 for "The way a startup will win against Google is by doing what Google did 10 years ago."
I find myself typing stuff like +<keyword> way too often in google, because google to be smart by including pages just because they are linked to by <keyword>.
Don't forget that this guy (still) works alone. He only needs a small niche, he doesn't need to beat Google at all. His users don't even have to be loyal; they could just be (temporarily) frustrated.
After trying to convince a friend that privacy is important, I got the usual retort: "It doesn't really matter to me if some company picks up on these things".
I wouldn't be surprised if others did start caring if the the negative side effects were brought up more thoroughly. After reading DDG's policy, I can't really point to where the negative side effects are. They aren't clearly spelled out and easily visible. I don't have much in the way of penmanship, but I'm sure that talent lies in the the readers of this website. Someone should clear up the cloudy negative effects of giving away their whole life to some company.
Side note: "Don't be evil" sounds just like the slogan of an evil company. :)
Beyond that, explaining things like this in plain English for people who don't normally think about things like search privacy are doing a great service for DDG.