There are substantial privacy and civil liberty issues with DuckDuckGo. Here they are spot-lighted:
torsocks dig @8.8.8.8 mx duckduckgo.com +tcp | grep -E '^\w'
==> “…duckduckgo-com.mail.protection.outlook.com”For the record, this is how Tor Project responds to criticism about their loyalty toward DuckDuckGo (their benefactor) in IRC:
18:20 < psychil> if torbrowser is going to be recommended, it should also be open to scrutiny. in the absence of that transparency, you create an untrustworthy forum.
18:20 < psychil> we’ve seen a loyalty from TB toward duckduckgo, but DDG is in partnership with Verizon, Yahoo, AOL et. al.
18:21 < psychil> all CISPA-sponsoring companies
18:22 < psychil> if ppl choose to trust them fair enough, but this trust shouldn’t be pushed on every user weighing their choice of browsers
18:26 -!- mode/#tor [-b psychil@!@*] by ChanServ
18:27 < YY_Bozhinsky> psychil: i am using Tor (thanks to Tor Devs)… PLUS brain - good bundle. I am happy. And please, don’t rush to change Reality (do it slowly with love and respect). Because it’s home for many ppl. They construct their lives in it. Think twice before ruining that. Please.
18:27 -!- mode/#tor [+b psychil!@] by ChanServ
18:27 -!- psychil was kicked from #tor by ChanServ [wont stop the FUD]
Indeed, Tor Project is notoriously fast to censor any discourse (no matter how civil) when it supports a narrative that doesn’t align with their view / propaganda.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
I think the fact that it isn’t open source is enough to try to avoid it.
Does anyone know a “good enough” open source alternative to duckduckgo ? I know there is yacy but the last time I tried it was disappointing. But maybe I don’t know how to use it :grinning face with sweat:
What about qwant.com? They do have their own index and are based in Europe, out of US privacy violating agencies. Not open source sadly. But I have been using it for about a year and the results are great.
SearX and MetaGer are open source. I find MetaGer reasonably okay for my searches (I was not too happy with SearX instances results). YaCy is also open source (Java based) and as a bonus it can be used for local search.
I just wish both of them had a more polished UI, so I could better recommend it to normies. MetaGer is a little better in this regard, but none of them come even close of startpage and DDGs in the normie appeal category, which just makes harder for people that aren’t 100% devoted to focus on privacy to switch.
YaCy is utter junk, even with basic searches it barely brings any results.
This thread does an interesting comparison:
https://lemmy.ml/post/29179
YaCy is a crawler. It’s a great tool for supplying your own search engine to the public, but end users will find searx nodes more practical.