While this is certainly an impressive feat, I've not found myself impressed with DuckDuckGo's results. I love the principles of having search results be free of personal information but, for a search provider that essentially collects and organizes other search engine's results, I always find myself back at Google. Often times the result I wanted was as many as 4 or 5 pages back, whereas with Google it's usually in the first 5 or so results, immediately seen on the first page.
Thank you for giving it a try! We're always trying to improve and to the extent you remember any specific examples we'd love to review them: http://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html
I prefer DDG for general search, but google was too good at digging up obscure code errors. I end up spending more time looking for errors than general stuff (which I guess means I'm a terrible programmer), so grudgingly switched back to the googs.
There's a different approach to DDG, which emphasises having a set of trusted sources rather than a powerful whole-web analysis as Google does. DDG often misses the wanted result, but often gives the result much higher up than Google.
I use Google more than I do DDG, but I use DDG enough that I miss the DDG shortcuts quite a bit when using Google: I recommend spending more time with DDG. The !hn shortcut, for instance, is quite useful around here.
There is a Chrome extension that allow DDG searches while keeping Google as your default:
I've switched to using DDG in FireFox for the past couple weeks. It works fine for 80% of searches and occasionally surprises me with the zero-click box, but the other 20% of the time I have to use Google.
If you can't find what you are looking for on DDG, just slap a !g on the query and you go straight to google. This slight inconvenience for some searches is outweighed by the power of !bangs and the zero click info.
You just have to get around the fact that they don't seem to be handling scaling very well and, as a result, the site becomes defunct every few minutes.
i ended my spree of lurking and made an account just so i could come in and second this. it's absolutely absurd to say that the government can spy on you via your webcam. most webcams (all?) don't even harbor their own direct connections to the internet so in order to access something like that, the government would have to assume full control of your machine, then install a streaming service and pray your router was configured to allow such connections.
while this is far from the only problem with the article (like cell phones that have been "completely turned off" being remotely tapped), i don't think most of its other flaws are even worth addressing. i just hope that the author secured his tin foil hat... you never know who's listening to your braiiiiiiiiiin waaaaaaaaaaaaaaves.
edit: i'd like to thank the author for his reply and comment on the other poster's reply. it was me who flew the tin foil hat flag, and for that i apologize to the author. surely there is some grounding for his statements and it is not my place to cast my own prejudices over his opinion. all i really aimed to get across was the fact that some of these things cannot be true for, if they were, as orthecreedence mentioned, the implications would be far beyond the surveillance capabilities. i think it's clear that the government has a strong hold over internet communications, but there are both ways around it (encryption -- they can't be breaking rsa unless they've got some fancy quantum computers we haven't been told about) and, as was stated, many reasons not to care. i just think you need to be more careful before you go inspiring fear in the hearts of others.
also, i looked into the resources you linked regarding the cell phones. the affidavits linked by the article were incredibly vague and gave no real technical evidence to your claims. the cnet article admits to speculation, seeing as how they had no concrete evidence past the suppositions of various people involved in security and law enforcement. while i can't rule out the possibility of this "remote handset activation", i'd hesitate to say it were possible.
