So ddg is down, so I visit Google. It’s been some years.
I just can’t believe how poor it’s results are, and how it’s trying to suggest things it think I might also want (and failing miserably).
I just assumed ddg would be the lesser, but I use it for privacy. Turns out I’m wrong.
How long has Google been this bad?
If you’re using DDG for privacy, then indeed you are wrong.
It may be “less invasive” than google, but it’s neither anonymous, nor private.
Direct privacy abuse:
DDG was caught violating its own privacy policy by issuing tracker cookies.
DDG’s app sends every URL you visit to DDG servers. (reaction).
DDG is currently collecting users’ operating systems and everything they highlight in the search results. (to verify this, simply hit F12 in your browser and select the “network” tab. Do a search with javascript enabled. Highlight some text on the screen. Mouseover the traffic rows and see that your highlighted text, operating system, and other details relating to geolocation are sent to DDG. Then change the query and submit. Notice that the previous query is being transmitted with the new query to link the queries together)
DDG is accused of fingerprinting users’ browsers.
When clicking an ad on the DDG results page, all data available in your session is sent to the advertiser, which is why the Epic browser project refuses to set DDG as the default browser.
DDG blacklisted Framabee, a search engine for the highly respected framasoft.org consortium."
CloudFlare:
DDG promotes one of the largest privacy abusing tech giants and adversary to the Tor community: CloudFlare Inc. DDG results give high rankings to CloudFlare sites, which consequently compromises privacy, net neutrality, and anonymity.
Full article: http://techrights.org/2020/07/02/ddg-privacy-abuser-in-disguise/
ETA: The bulk of the text in my reply was lifted from a reddit comment. I tried to format my comment to reflect that it’s a “quote”, alas I’ve failed. Hence this.
Also, I don’t have a card in this game. I understand anonymity and privacy - I dislike intentional deception.
What to use them, if not DDG
I’ve collected these 3 so far, but Swiss Cows if you go deep enough uses Bing. I’m not sure about Mojeek or Start Page.
Swisscows does use Bing, Startpage uses Bing and/or Google depending upon where you are, we are fully independent: https://www.searchenginemap.com/ is a visualisation that might be useful
So is Mojeek a standalone since it’s yellow? It looks like a lot of other people use them and not the other way around. Yep is cool, but I think they get their money from the sites that pay them? I looked at it yesterday, it’s sort of a strange set up that I’m not sure I understand.
yes we are indeed a standalone, the sizes of bubbles are reflections of the number of index-usage relationships yep is attached to ahrefs: https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/03/yep-search-engine/ where I can speak to where results come from, I couldn’t tell you about their model
Mojeek gives good results, I’ll keep trying it. I’m not sure about yep though, how do the people get paid? I didn’t see any sign up. It sounds like it’s a platform for their SEO subscribers.
sorry for taking a while to get back but the main source of mojeek revenue is api sales, having people pay to access results for different applications (bing does similar i.e. duckduckgo, qwant, ecosia)
That’s interesting and a decent way to do it.
I’m currently using searx.be with good results
Searx improved a lot since I last used it. Was really slow before
Its searxng now (the original searx is dead) and is quite good. Performance differs. I’ve seen very slow instances, but when I started hosting my own semi-private instance, I saw how fast it can be, if the server isn’t a potato.