Its shady for many reasons… I quit using it
I read an article on tor about the problems with many “privacy respecting” search engines, including ddg, here: https://digdeeper.club/articles/search.xhtml
Misinformation being downranked seems to be a major plus to me. 🤷♀️
+1 Yes!
I don’t understand why people want to see misinformation in their search honestly. There’s a lot of this “oh no its ‘censoring’ my results so its bad” thinking in some parts of the privacy community and its not healthy IMO.
I do that agree that there is a time and a place for censorship though, in some instances it can potentially overstretch what most consider to be fair, but with most things you can’t please everyone. Personally as long as I get 🚢🏴☠️🧲 in my search results I’m happy.
If all search was uncensored, and people were a button click away from seeing NSFL (note: not NSFW) stuff all the time, the internet would be a very different place… and various countries would have likely forgone it in favor of their own national intranet (such as NK or PRC kinda have)
NO.
- it is US-based
- the CEO is the former founder of the “Names Database”
for the love of god, use anything but DDG. Qwant is EU-based and has decent results, SearX is another one which lets you choose between instances (or host your own).
please stop taking US “privacy” services seriously. i was hoping people would know better on here, compared to reddit
Didn’t DDG get caught allowing some Microsoft tracking and blocking some search results a couple of years back? Personally I use Firefox and starpage as a search engine.
I think they had a contractual situation that they were navigating. They were transparent about it and resolved that situation quite quickly.
Edit: Due to using Bing as a backend. It was potentially an uncomfortable bind they found themselves in.
Personally, I found people to be overreacting and DuckDuckGo‘s actions reasonable and transparent. Here’s the story:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-scripts/
I’ve used Startpage until they got bought by an ad company. Haven’t looked into it since then:
No. Plus the founder is pro-censorship and weighting search results based on his own worldview.
At this point Searx is the only viable option, both in terms of privacy and results. Yes it ultimately ends up using the backend of the big three, but with customizable layers of abstraction and behaviour.
