Privacy

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DDG vs. Startpage vs. Searxes (lemmy.ml)

submitted 5 years ago* (last edited 5 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

2 comments fedilink hide all child comments

In terms of privacy, this is how the Searxes (meta of meta searches) compares to DDG, Startpage, and Mojeek:

privacy factor	DDG	Startpage	Mojeek	Searxes
caught violating privacy policy	yes	no	no	no
bad track record (history of privacy abuse)	yes (CEO founded Names DB)	owned by targetted ad agency	no
feeds other privacy abusers	yes (Verizon-Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, CloudFlare)	yes (Google, CloudFlare)	no	no
privacy-hostile sites in search results	yes	yes	yes (but appears less frequent than ddg)	no (CloudFlare sites filtered out)
server code is open source	no	no	no	yes
has an onion site	yes (but Tor-hostile results still given)	no	no	yes
gives users a proxy or cache	no	yes (using Anonymous View feature)	no	yes (via the favicons)

Superficially Metager is privacy respecting and there's even an .onion host for it. So I'll have to add it to the table in the future.

For the moment, I'll say that Metager shares the following with advertisers:

first 2 blocks of your IP address
user-agent string
your search query They say it's for non-personalised advertizing.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 years ago (1 children)

Thanks for sharing. Would be nice to have some sources about the claim that DDG is not privacy friendly. Furthermore recently I found this web page about privacy friendly search engines. https://restoreprivacy.com/private-search-engine/ (a website using cloudflare itself). What is your opinion about Mojeek and MetaGer ? (MetaGer is open source and can be self-hosted).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 years ago* (last edited 5 years ago)

Mojeek does their own crawling. That's quite impressive, because unlike DDG it means they don't have to choose from a pool of privacy abusers to buy search results. I did a test search on "petition sites" and was impressed that the first page did not contain the typical privacy abusing cloudflare results (change.org, moveon.org, etc). Mojeek also does not buy hosting from Amazon/MS/Google. I should perhaps add them to the table.

I didn't know MetaGer was free software. I occasionally use metager.com but my first port of call is Searxes b/c searxes filters out cloudflare sites.