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DuckDuckGo Now Says It Will Block Microsoft Trackers
DuckDuckGo responds to recent criticism saying the third-party tracking scripts it blocks will now include scripts from Microsoft.
Earlier this year, a security researcher discovered DuckDuckGo’s mobile browser transferring data to Microsoft-owned properties when visiting certain websites.
As a company that promises never to track users, DuckDuckGo found itself in trouble when the security researcher shared his findings online.
The issue stems from DuckDuckGo’s search syndication deal with Microsoft Bing, and CEO Gabriel Weinberg dismissed it, saying “nothing can provide 100% protection.”
See: DuckDuckGo’s Search Deal Prevents Browser From Blocking Microsoft TrackersNow, Weinberg is on a mission to “raise the standard of trust,” as he announces DuckDuckGo is expanding third-party tracker loading protection.
“Raising that standard means maximizing the privacy we offer by default, being transparent about how our privacy protections work, and doing our best to make the Internet less creepy. Recently, I’ve heard from a number of users and understand that we didn’t meet their expectations around one of our browser’s web tracking protections. So today we are announcing more privacy and transparency around DuckDuckGo’s web tracking protections.”
DuckDuckGo Blocks Microsoft TrackersDuckDuckGo is expanding the third-party tracking scripts it blocks from loading on websites to include Microsoft trackers.
This update is rolling out over the next week to DuckDuckGo’s mobile browsing apps on iOS and Android and its desktop browser extensions.
Weinberg continues in a blog post:
“This expands our 3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection, which blocks identified tracking scripts from Facebook, Google, and other companies from loading on third-party websites, to now include third-party Microsoft tracking scripts. This web tracking protection is not offered by most other popular browsers by default and sits on top of many other DuckDuckGo protections.”
Weinberg adds that DuckDuckGo’s tracker loading protection is no longer held back by a policy agreement with Microsoft:
“Previously, we were limited in how we could apply our 3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection on Microsoft tracking scripts due to a policy requirement related to our use of Bing as a source for our private search results. We’re glad this is no longer the case. We have not had, and do not have, any similar limitation with any other company.”
After the update rolls out next week, one third-party tracker will be allowed to load to help advertisers measure ad clicks.
Weinberg explains why DuckDuckGo doesn’t block the tracker bat.bing.com by default:
“Currently, if an advertiser wants to detect conversions for their own ads that are shown on DuckDuckGo, 3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection will not block bat.bing.com requests from loading on the advertiser’s website following DuckDuckGo ad clicks, but these requests are blocked in all other contexts.”
Disabling ads in DuckDuckGo’s search settings will allow you to avoid all trackers.
Providing further transparency, DuckDuckGo has published a new page with a complete list of all the web tracking protections it offers.
Source: DuckDuckGo
Featured Image: Sharaf Maksumov/Shutterstock
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How To Beat Your Competition Using Only SERPs
This post was sponsored by Bright Data. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
Wondering how you can easily beat your competition without adding another tool to your marketing stack?
The answers to how your competition is beating you are available to you – for free.
Where? How?
In SERP data on SERPs.
What Is A SERP & How Does It Help Me Beat My Competitors?Search engine results pages (SERPs) are the results shown when you search for anything on search engines like Google, Bing, and more.
SERP data is the information located within each individual result on the SERP.
This data is free-to-see, public web data that can help you improve and boost your position in search engines around the world.
You can pull SERP information from both paid and organic search results, and get full visibility into what your competition is doing.
You can use SERPs to:
Uncover hidden trends. Improve paid advertising. Expose content gaps. Understand how content performs from region to region.But how do you easily find this information to better your content?
Have it automatically collected by a SERP scraper.
Get the data immediately, so you can start building your SEO strategy faster.
Easily Collect Free Competitor Information Using SERP ScrapersSERP scrapers, or SERP AIs, can easily and automatically collect SERP data from different search engines.
Long story short, there is a lot of great data to collect, due to the different factors that affect a SERP, such as location, search history, and device.
These ever-increasing factors continue to make it difficult to perform manual SERP data collection.
With SERP scrapers, you no longer need to do it by hand.
Instead, these SERP AIs allow you to automate the data collection process, pulling web data from countless different sources at once, in real-time, in order to gather large volumes of data.
In turn, you get greater visibility into competitor research as the scale of the job increases – and overall saves time.
Automate Competitor Research & Free Up Bandwidth With SERP ScrapersTo fully automate SERP data collection, companies are running their SERP scrapers through public web data collection infrastructures.
SERP scraper automation can help you:
Instantly see what SERP content is working for your competitors. Geotarget requests from users to understand different targeting techniques. Understand SERP intent from all angles, down to how a device matches users’ needs. Unlock content behind walls that block search engine bots, such as CAPTCHA solving. How To Setup Your Own SERP ScraperSome companies create their own SERP scrapers from scratch, but this can be a time-consuming option.
Luckily, there are other, faster options.
Use SERP APIsMany web data providers offer SERP APIs that require little to no coding experience to collect web data from the result pages.
These tools are specially designed to target all the major search engines, and automatically pull data from the result pages.
Once you’ve chosen your SERP scraper, it’s time to configure the AI and start getting access to free competitor data.
Configure Your Research ParametersUsing your SERP API dashboard, you will be able to designate the different parameters for search requests, custom to your workflow and data needs.
You can choose specific parameters for your scrape, such as:
Geo-targeting. Language used. Search filters. Safe mode SERPs. Device used. SERP features, such as maps, shopping, hotels, flights, news, etc. Increase SERP AccessSimilar to data collection infrastructure, some SERP AI tools have unblocking technology to help your scraper search like a real person.
Your scraper should be able to bypass CAPTCHA checks in order to help you get the full competitor breakdown.
Setup Automatic Algorithm UpdatesThe SERP API you choose should be able to make updates when changes to the results page are made by the search engines.
This is specifically helpful considering there are constant changes being made to the structure and algorithms of SERPs, and new features are being added to these pages more and more frequently.
If your scraper is not up to date, it will either return inaccurate data or be unable to read the page and deliver the data desired by the request.
What To Look Out For If You Create An In-House SERP ScraperIf you were to create a scraper in-house, you would need to regularly update the scraper’s code manually to ensure that it matches the structure of the website.
However, when using a SERP API designed by a web data provider, you do not need to be bothered with this process.
Providers typically monitor changes to all the major search engines and update the scraper accordingly to ensure accurate and uninterrupted real-time data collection.
How To Compile SERP Data Using A SERP Scraper – A Simple ExampleLet’s say you wanted to collect public web data on a hotel – including prices, availability, reviews, and more.
How To Conduct Hotel Competitor SERP Research By HandIf you were to research this SERP manually, Google Search and Google Travel are great tools to use to uncover free research and data.
Enter the hotel’s name into Google Search. Notice the initial details in the resulting knowledge graph, such as reviews, specific arrival and departure dates, and the number of guests. Compare prices to understand what competitive packages you can offer to compete. Uncover booking popularity in order to drive your own campaigns and sales. Continue to manually dive deeper and uncover more data.From here, you can begin to create your strategy, which will open up more avenues to manually research more options and data points.
How To Conduct Hotel Competitor SERP Research AutomaticallyThrough SERP API, you can do all of that automatically.
Steps 1 – 5 are completed by SERP APIs, and include new parameters, such as price comparisons, dates, ages of the guests, whether free cancellation is included, and more to collect additional price combinations.Competitor research is done for you, so you can start creating your new strategy.
An example of what these searches would look like can be found here.
Make It Easy: Let Us Scrape SERPs For YouFundamentally, in today’s world, SERP data provides the building blocks and direction for digital marketers to improve their rankings in search engines across the world. For this reason, a mass amount of public web data is needed.
In order to automate this web scraping process, companies are using SERP scrapers designed by web data providers to pull accurate results from the web in real time, which has significantly improved the manual process this task originated from.
Overall, with the help of web data providers, gathering large-scale amounts of SERP data is a much more manageable task than it was even a few years ago, and now, companies are able to sit back, relax, and watch the data roll in – saving both time and effort in the long-run, and helping companies focus on what matters most: the insights.
For more information on how web data collection can help your business, please visit Bright Data.
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Social
Social Data
Cost and overhead previously rendered this semi-public form of communication unfeasible.
But advances in social networking technology from 2004-2010 has made broader concepts of sharing possible.