this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2021
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Privacy
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I really don’t see DDG as an alternative.
Can you explain why?
(Just out of curiosity.)
I guess it's because it's hosted in the US on Microsoft Azure
More than that, it doesn't have its own indexes, most of them come from ms bing, see: https://lemmy.ml/post/43595/comment/22034
Has DDG mentioned what data, if any, they send to those indexes? I'm just wondering if, say Bing, just sees a single "user" for DDG with all the searches. Then at least your query is obfuscated among all the rest. Still not ideal, but better than Google anyway I think. I also think that's how Searx works.
I hope they do. But I can't really tell. Searx is another thing, since its code is FLOSS, and there are instances on different countries...
Oh yeah, forgot about that. Thanks for linking this thread though.
And what about Startpage?
The problem is that it isn't free software. I recommend using Searx
I used Startpage recently because @[email protected] recommend it here: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/favorite_apps_and_services.html
But yeah, I tried SearX and I like it. Looks a bit outdated but overall offer great results and i felt lightweight too!
Nice :) You can switch themes with SearX. I also like the fact that you can choose from for example Qwant, DDG, Startpage,Yahoo (Google lately often gave errors about too many requests, so I turned that off). And if you don't want or cannot self host it, there are a lot of SearX instances to choose from. https://searx.space/ <-> 90 online instances. Of course it is up to you which instance admin you like to trust.
What's your favorite instance? Mine are (for now): https://searx.prvcy.eu/ and https://searx.fmac.xyz/
According to them, they still operate from EU (The Netherlands 🇳🇱). Here's the link to the statement: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/en/Knowledgebase/Article/View/1275/0/what-is-startpages-relationship-with-privacy-onesystem1-and-what-does-this-mean-for-my-privacy-protections
I see that I missed some news : https://www.startpage.com/privacy-please/startpage-articles/startpage-relisted-on-privacytools
Is a valid criticism as it benefits Google's monopolistic business.