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.
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.
I recently learned about it, but haven't used it. From what I understand, it's similar to how the fediverse works; individual instances are run by whoever wants to run them. If you run your own instance, you have complete trust in it, but you effectively aren't anonymous (unless you support a whole bunch of users to pool together. If you join someone else's instance, you have to trust them. There's public and private instances.
The other downside is that, like many other small players, they are a metasearch engine, so they rely on the big players like Google and Bing who actually crawl the web for information to index. If Google or Bing want to hide information, that trickles down into metasearch engines, too. It's somewhat buffered by thr fact that your metasearch can look through a whole bunch of different indexes, so you aren't held to one countries censorship, but it probably still has an effect.
Searx is dead. You'll want to use SearxNG instead.