Video Of The Week: Gabriel Weinberg on Search and Privacy
I came across this short (~12min) interview of Gabe this past week. I enjoyed it and I think you all will too:
And if you want to see something cool and new from Gabe’s search engine (and USV portfolio company) DuckDuckGo, check out this search query.
Comments (Archived):
That search query rocks! Here’s mine:https://duckduckgo.com/?q=w…It’s pretty cold here, Fred. Sometimes, gloating is not optional.
Cool engine..The real problem is getting help with the questions you have. Search is great for finding a site to shop on. But it’s inferior to finding professionals that have experience with what you’re working on that will help you by providing the things computer systems can’t. Same with all the baloney automated phone systems..If Ducky doesn’t store information about the searcher then that’s great. But getting a gazillion useless result sites from the people who bid the most on search terms is great for the search company but of next to no value for the searcher.
“Maximum possible” vs. “Minimum acceptable” data collection. That’s a powerful dichotomy that possibly frames the future of the Internet. It made me think of the “data donor” concept that Brad Burnham mentioned in Berlin. I’d love to see a future where consumers are in total control of their data, and who gets to see it or use it.
Control always come at a some cost in money or effort and we’re all so addicted to free on the Web.On the other hand clean/tightly packaged personal-data-control with a reasonable/integrated pricing formula could become popular.How that would work, I have no idea ?
Probably via simple settings, today. But going forward, maybe via a new generation of capabilities.
The problem is the web is filled with selling – selling products, selling services, selling propaganda, selling lies, etc..The 7 Habits tell us: Seek first to understand. Then to be understood..If you’re gonna’ claim to provide valuable information to people you first must ask their objective. So if I enter “make millions as a venture capitalist” into a search box. I don’t want to get all the content from people selling me something. I want the inside secrets revealed. No website is gonna’ give you those for free. There needs to be an exchange between both parties that entices both to come together towards a common goal..The web doesn’t provide that. TV could have provided education to all. But instead its full of shit. The web is going, almost already there, to the same place..Searching through a trash heap to find new items still in the package probably isn’t going to provide many results.
Too bad the ad is completely irrelevant
Free-form text searches do that.
I wanna watch “Play” and “Involuntary” and can’t find either anywhere online and I’ve looked.
Rely
Privacy is an interesting angle to compete against Google. Gabe’s initial vision of surfacing answers instead of just links is also compelling. What I really want out of a search engine today is indexing & deep linking of mobile in-app content combined with mobile friendly results for web-only content. If, for example, Apple bought DuckDuckGo, incorporated their results into iOS Spotlight search, and also provided app developers with tools to index their in-app content into those same search results, that’s a serious threat to Google.
What about de partnership with Yandex (Russian Google)? Mr. Weinberg did not mention it.