 The original idea for this video was to talk about why DuckDuckGo sucks, and I will cover that in a bit, but I thought it would be better to take a more broad approach and ask the question, why aren't there any good, privacy-respecting search engines out there? And when I mean good, I mean good in the way that they actually deliver you good search results. Today, I'm going to talk through some of the obvious and not so obvious reasons why those things don't exist. And then I'm going to rant a bit about the unfairness of the universe and why it seems to be colluding with Google and other major corporations to prevent us from actually having good open-source search engines that don't steal all of our data and try to rule the world. The number one reason why there aren't any good non-Google search engines out there is that Google has all the data in the world. Now, that sounds like hyperbole, but it really isn't. They have all the data. Everybody in the world uses Google, probably everyone that has an internet connection at least uses Google, so they have all the data that they could want. Because they have all this data, they can use computer algorithms to create much better search results than search engines that don't have that data. It's all about knowledge. For example, take two people, one is 13, one is 30. It's almost certain that the 30-year-old has more knowledge. Generalization, yes, but it's a safe assumption. They've lived longer, they have more world experiences. That's Google in a nutshell. They've been around for a long time. They've done a really good job of taking in data and learning how to use it. And they're evil. I mean, ruthless or immoral. At least they're more evil, ruthless and immoral than other search engines. So they have no qualms about tracking and getting as much information data as possible. And that's really what it comes down to. Google has no morals regarding tracking and crawling the internet because that's their job. And in the end, that's why they have the best search results on the internet. Relatedly, the reason why DuckDuckGo and other related open source slash privacy-focused search engines can't keep up is because Google has all this data, they've managed to create their own little monopoly. DuckDuckGo and other privacy-respecting search engines can't do the same. They don't have the resources to do what Google does. And on top of that, a lot of Google's data comes from tracking their users, something that DuckDuckGo and others aren't willing to do, and the privacy-respecting search engines are actually at a bigger disadvantage even on top of the whole resources argument. And that's unlikely to change. The other issue outside of Google's evil stash of data is that people like Google and use Google. They don't seem to have a problem with using Google, most people. Google has become synonymous with searching the web, similar to how Kleenex has become synonymous with facial tissue. It's hard to compete with something like that when no one really wants to know about any alternatives. As a user, you have to be interested enough in something other than Google in order to even search out something else. You have to have that motivation to go from Google to DuckDuckGo, and most people just don't have that. Most people could care less because Google is so good at what it does. For DuckDuckGo, this means that it will always be small. And that's okay. Kleenex is always going to be small, too. That doesn't mean it can't be successful. Quality over quantity. The problem is DuckDuckGo sucks. We've already talked about the reasons, or a couple of the reasons. There are other reasons as well, which we'll talk about here in a few minutes. But if we look at a different goal that being maintaining the little user base that DuckDuckGo has, then we have to look towards the result of the things that we talked about. And the end result of them not having this data and not being good at using the data that they do have is that their search engine and their search results are bad. It's a sad truth. I can't say or count the number of times I've gone to DuckDuckGo, searched for something, and then just had to go to Google instead or use the G-Bang. It seems like it's every time I visit DuckDuckGo. It's just the way it seems. It's not. I do get some good results from DuckDuckGo. And it seems to have been proved in certain areas. In other areas, it's still just as bad as it always has been. Mostly, this is a problem of lack of data, as we've already talked about. And the fact that the search engines that DuckDuckGo is based on are equally terrible at being good search engines, looking at you being. So the question is, what's the solution? I'm not a developer, not even a little bit. My technical ability to solve this problem is non-existent, even if I did have some technological solution that I had in mind to solve this problem. I don't. It's going to take a team of very brilliant people to get together to solve this problem. It's not going to be solved by one dude on YouTube. But I do have some ideas. My idea is that DuckDuckGo and similar open source search engines use the power of the FOS community to improve their data collection. DuckDuckGo ambassadors, as we'll call them, they can go out and evangelize DuckDuckGo and try to get websites to actually allow their websites to be indexed by DuckDuckGo. That's one idea. Now, there are DuckDuckGo crawlers out there, and they don't need explicit permission to crawl the internet. But it helps if the websites send out signals to this crawler to let it know that their website needs to be crawled again. It's the robots.txt file, but allowing it to be used for DuckDuckGo. Again, it's more technical than that, and I'm not technologically advanced enough to understand what's already being done, what's being prevented from being done, and all that stuff. So that's just one option. Alternatively, a volunteer browser extension could be used. What this would do is it would crawl websites as they are visited. So basically what you'd do is you'd volunteer to install this extension, but DuckDuckGo has an extension already, but it doesn't do this as far as I know. And as you visit your websites throughout the day, it would index everyone that you visit. This obviously would be very hard to anonymize. So if you volunteered for something like this, you'd need to be aware right up front that your data and web history would be sent to DuckDuckGo. And that's obviously going to be a problem for a lot of people, but some people wouldn't probably volunteer. But with a good army of volunteers out there browsing the web, this could significantly increase DuckDuckGo's share of web data. Add to that that DuckDuckGo already has a web crawler. If they can somehow make that a little bit better and get more, even more information, that too will help improve search results. The other angle to look at this from is the algorithm. Now, the Google goes on and on and on about their algorithm. We have no idea how the algorithm works. It's a secret, kind of like the recipe for chicken at KFC. It's possible that one of the reasons why search results on sites like DuckDuckGo are bad is that they're not as good at searching through the data and presenting that data as Google is. So my argument here is maybe they have all the data that they need, which I don't really think that they do. But it's possible that they have plenty of data. It's just that they don't know how to index that data and present it in a way that benefits the user in terms of a good search result. How do they solve this? That I really can't answer. But really, the answer there is resources. They would need more funding and more developers and so on. So in conclusion, we're stuck using Google. It's a sad thing. Or more accurately, we're stuck using Google if we want good search results. And we will be stuck until we have some other solution. And I don't know that it will ever happen without some kind of major intervention or invention. Some kind of major shift in the way the web works might upset Google in terms of its superiority over everything else. It makes one kind of sad to know that you rely on a company that can't really be trusted. And if you do go to an alternative, you'll be getting significantly inferior results. Thank you for watching. If you have a good idea on how we can make open source search on the web better, let me know in the comments below. Any comments would be welcome. I always enjoy our discussions down there. Make sure you like and subscribe. I really do appreciate every one of you who watch my videos. So thank you for watching. You can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast, and you can support us on Patreon and LibraPay. I just signed up for that today. I'm not actually sure how you say it. LibraPay, LibraPay, links in the video description. Before I go, I'd like to thank our current patrons, Devon, Marcus, Meglin, Donnie, Sven, Merrick, Kamp and Mitchell. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.