this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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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'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.
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.
I have good experience with brave search, after I moved away from the crap Qwant actually is
Qwant is that bad? I remember hearing decent things about it a few years ago but I never got around to trying it because it's blocked in my country for some god forsaken reason.
That's exactly one of the reasons why I find it shit. It's not blocked in my country but as soon I need to go abroad, can't use it anymore. There's more reasons why it sucks and some of them are recent
That's exactly one of the reasons why I find it shit. It's not blocked in my country but as soon I need to go abroad, can't use it anymore. There's more reasons why it sucks and some of them are recent
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.
I believe Startpage uses Google
Mojeek isn't perfect, but it's truly independent search engine.
and when people let us know where we fall down we're able to make it better, growing alongside the userbase!
Do they "give high rankings" to CloudFlare sites because they just boost up whoever is behind CloudFlare, or because the sites happen to be good search hits, maybe that load quickly, and they don't go in and penalize them for... telling CloudFlare that you would like them to send you the page when you go to the site?
Counting the number of times results for different links are clicked is expected search engine behavior. Recording what search strings are sent from results pages for what other search strings is also probably fine, and because of the way forms and referrers work (the URL of the page you searched from has the old query in it) the page's query will be sent in the referrer by all browsers by default even if the site neither wanted it nor intends to record it. Recording what text is highlighted is weird, but probably not a genuine threat.
The remote favicon fetch design in their browser app was fixed like 4 years ago.
The "accusation" of "fingerprinting" was along the lines of "their site called a canvas function oh no". It's not "fingerprinting" every time someone tries to use a canvas tag.
What exactly is "all data available in my session" when I click on an ad? Is it basically the stuff a site I go to can see anyway? Sounds like it's nothing exciting or some exciting pieces of data would be listed.
This analysis misses the important point that none of this stuff is getting cross-linked to user identities or profiles. The problem with Google isn't that they examine how their search results pages are interacted with in general or that they count Linux users, it's that they keep a log of what everyone individually is searching, specifically. Not doing that sounds "anonymous" to me, even if it isn't Tor-strength anonymity that's resistant to wiretaps.
There's an important difference between "we're trying to not do surveillance capitalism but as a centralized service data still comes to our servers to actually do the service, and we don't boycott all of CloudFlare, AWS, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo", as opposed to "we're building shadow profiles of everyone for us and our 1,437 partners". And I feel like you shouldn't take privacy advice from someone who hosts it unencrypted.
Excellent reply. Thank you. Do you have any suggestions for alternatives?
Fuck this. Fuck search engines. I'm going back to curated website lists.
Webrings ftw
I knew my bookmarks would save me
I never left.
Where do you find them?
My FIL has a book from the 90s that's basically an internet yellow pages.
Bring back DMOZ and the Yahoo directory.
Also as DDG is based in the US it is most likely legally bound to give your informations to any agency with a nice gag order on top of it.
I can't imagine any serious privacy oriented business to be headquartered in the US.
The whole better privacy is true with DDG but certainly not to the extent people would like to think.
That being said DDG has decent search results and is slightly better than Google for privacy. Google is an ecosystem so every little bit you don't give them is a success.
It's really too bad we don't have good private search engines..
Christ on a bicycle.
I just learnt of searx today, any bad news there?
I'm running a search instance on a VPS so my home IP isn't linked to my searches. The main disadvantage is that my VPS is in Toronto and I live 2hrs away so geo searches don't work very well. For instance, if I Google "restaurants" I get results for local restaurants whereas if I Gregle (I named my search engine Gregle) I get results for results near my VPS.
DM me if you want a link to my instance to check it out. It's open but I don't publicize it because bad actors could ruin my IP addresses reputation with spam queries via the API.
Searx is dead. You'll want to use SearxNG instead.
Not to be dismissive, but if you deconstruct every website like this, won't they all look horrible? I mean how long would Google's list be if you detailed every single controversy and dodgy thing they've done in/to/from their search engine?
Thanks for sharing - didnt know. Thats a long list ..... So which search engine is good and privacy friendly then?
They also do ranked search like google, although not as bad but i think that is just a factor of age. Actual search term is often 5th or more down page