this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2021

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Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo grew by 62% in 2020 (www.bleepingcomputer.com)

submitted 4 years ago by Rumblestiltskin to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

We can do better than DuckDuckGo

It’s not open source:

Almost all of DDG’s software is proprietary, and they’ve demonstrated gross incompetence in privacy in what little software they have made open source. Who knows what else is going on in the proprietary code?

DuckDuckGo is not a search engine:

It’s more aptly described as a search engine frontend. They do handle features like bangs and instant answers internally, but their actual search results come from third-parties like Bing. They don’t operate a crawler for their search results, and are not independent.

...

Also, if you are using ddg, consider using their html version ddg/html to avoid this:

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)

from https://lemmy.ml/post/31321

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 years ago (2 children)

Yes, we can do better than DDG, but for now there's not really anything better. Maybe Qwant can be great, though it mainly uses Bing's results (and it's french, which is a quite better than the US in terms of privacy), though there have been some controversies surrounding it recently and it has been strongly supported by the french government.

Maybe mojeek will grow to become something usable.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago)

That may be true, but there is a mindset in many that they are some valiant knight.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Mojeek is proprietary, even if it becomes usable that doesn't mean they will protect your privacy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 years ago (1 children)

That's true, but I still prefer having the choice between many proprietary services than having the choice between just 2 proprietary services.

A FLOSS one would be great. There's Gigablast, but it seems like it's not really evolving much. Though its index is quite up to date.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago (1 children)

What do you mean by "not evolving"?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago (1 children)

They have had roughly 1 commit per year in the last few years on GitHub, and their UI seems to be stuck in the 90s

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 years ago (1 children)

their UI seems to be stuck in the 90s

Great! That means it's minimal and works well in text based web browsers. Loading tons of JavaScript, having flashy colors and adding tons of features most people will never use isn't good design, there was nothing wrong with the old way of doing things.

They have had roughly 1 commit per year in the last few years on GitHub

It could be because there is nothing to add? It's a search engine, it's supposed to search stuff. As long as index is up date everything should be fine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago (1 children)

having flashy colors and adding tons of features most people will never use isn’t good design

Their UI is full of flashy colors!

Having no JS doesn't mean that the website needs to look like shit. If you want normal people to use your website, you need to have a design that appeals to the majority (and it is possible without JS). For example, Gitea works fine with JS disabled while still having a fantastic looking clean UI.

It could be because there is nothing to add? It’s a search engine, it’s supposed to search stuff. As long as index is up date everything should be fine.

Yes and no, if it doesn't evolve anymore, it means that the search results will never become as relevant as they are in other search engines. This means that it can never appeal to a larger crowd.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

In my opinion the colors they use are fairly flat and ui in general looks good. Results are decent, I might switch to this thank you for the suggestion. Also this will never appeal to the larger crowd, not without tons of marketing. They simply don't have the resources for it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

It is possible to appeal to the larger crowd without a ton of marketing, see Signal recently for example!

And it's not like they're not capable of doing stuff, on their front-page they advertise the service private.sh, in partnership with Private Internet Access.

Results are decent

I don't believe that you actually think that.

Edit: I quoted the wrong part, I meant I didn't beleive you when you said "ui in general looks good"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Signal was just lucky, one tweet brought it glory. I didn't use it much yet but from what I can tell yes results decent for an independent search engine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Signal was already being used by non tech-savvy people, and it was able to gain that much popularity because its UX is decent enough.

I quoted the wrong part, I meant:

ui in general looks good

I don't believe you actually think that.

The results themselves are somewhat decent.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago

Yes I really do like the UI. It screams Web 1.0 and it's beautiful, I love classic web UIs. I just really like how they look, I really don't like the generic and bland look of modern UIs of the web services of today, with some exceptions.