The Duck Is Gaining Over the Google Goose
July 5, 2013
Remember the old child game “duck duck goose?” It is now time to play “duck duck Google” with the top search engine chasing DuckDuckGo around in a circle. The privacy-based search engine may still end up being in the metaphorical pot, but Search Engine Journal reports, “DuckDuckGo vs. Google (Impressive New Stats)” that will make anyone quack with enthusiasm. According to new statistics released by DuckDuckGo, the tiny search engine has peeked at passing the two million searches in one day.
“It’s not compared to the billions daily that Google, Bing, or Facebook have but it’s a really good start. What’s most impressive is the HUGE increase and triple in traffic since January of this year!”
In February, DuckDuckGo hit its first one million web searches in a single day and only four months later they were able to double it. It is amazing news considering the billions of searches that are conducted via Google, Bing, and Facebook everyday. The underdog is coming out to show its thunder. Take note big engines, people do not like to have their searches tracked. DuckDuckGo is a metasearch engine, so it aggregates its results from other tools. However it does keep the results anonymous!
Whitney Grace, July 05, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
ROBERT STEELE: I know Larry Page and Vint Cerf, and have been an admirer of their engineering prowess for over a decade in the case of Larry, since 1992 in the case of Vint. Unfortunately, they prove the adage that two engineers between them cannot contrive a heart, a soul, or a human brain. I was one of the early adopters of DuckDuckGo for the simple reason that it makes more sense out of millions of possibilities than Google does.
Everything Jim Bamford has written about NSA can also be said about Google — indeed I would encourage strong suspicions about Google still being a front play for CIA and NSA. Whether intentionally or not, Google has followed — a bit more competently — the same mind-set pathologies as NSA: collect everything, process nothing (for an intelligence professional, processing means machine-assisted sense-making). What Google serves up in a search is the very best that mathematics can do, and therein lies the problem: mathematics is formulaic, and by definition, stuck in the past — it can only process new information on the basis of old algorithms. Of course it can be taught to “learn” and IBM has done some good in that area, but at the root of the challenge lies the triumph over the human brain over any computer when it comes to doing more with less faster. That is of course why NSA and CIA despise human brains and favor technical idiocy: it means less money to play with, never mind that the public gets screwed on every decision.
Lacking still today across the entire panorama of public-private information services and information technology is a strategic appreciation for intelligence (decision-support) with integrity. This is what I have been focused on since 1988, when I was the senior civilian creating the Marine Corps Intelligence Center, and it shames me — but no longer surprises me — that there is not a single professional in the US Government now serving who actually wants to do this: create intelligence with integrity. The good ones have left, and left at the top are the technocrats or friends of the ubber-technocrat, all moving money and making no sense at all in the public interest.
The innovation today is centered in the Open Source Everything (OSE) arena, and I single out the convergence among the various curation tools (Robin Good does a wonderful job of curation on curation, we carry him now as a contributing editor) and the humanitarian technologists centered on Crisis Mapping and Twitter and/or Short Message System (SMS) as the Alternative C2 (collaboration and consensus, not command and control) platofrm. We are within five years of a tipping point, in my view.
Within five years real time public intelligence will be able to catch every politician in a lie and every serving official in a corrupt act, as these betrayals of the public trust are occurring — more importantly, the knowledge will be instantly translatable into a virtual flash mob that can destroy a Member of Congress or impeach a senior Executive, overnight. I am optimistic about the future of the USA, and the prospects for a prosperous world at peace. Spies and secrecy in an open world are both an oxymoron, and an anachronism. We still need spies and secrecy — especially in counterintelligence against our own traitors — but no one now serving is capable of focusing spies and secrecy properly because they lack any ken of the necessary foundation and over-arching context of OSE combined with M4IS2 – Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making.
What does it say about the USA when $60-100 billion a year (depending on whether you count black intel by Special Operations Forces) produces “at best” 4% of what a top decision-maker needs, and nothing at all for everyone else? What is one to make of two intelligence oversight committees that appear preoccupied with their secret pork and oblivious to the fact that their authorization means nothing to anyone, at the same time that they could be sponsoring intelligence (decision-support) for all Congressional jurisdictions, where Agriculture and Water are arguably vastly more important to the public interest than the false war on terrorism?
This is what I think about every single day and into the night. Have brain, will travel.
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