from Hacker News

If we can't trust DuckDuckGo, which one then?

by bratak on 4/16/22, 3:43 PM with 14 comments

According to this post, we can't trust DDG anymore.

I'm totally frustrated, because I thought DDG is finally a great search engine that respects privacy.

Which search engine can we trust then?

Is the solution to use something like https://yacy.net ?

Or is there another way to save search the web without beeing stalked, tracked and sucked?

Our world is so messed up... :-(

  • by bratak on 4/16/22, 3:44 PM

    Sorry, here's the link to the posting I mentioned:

    https://lemmy.ml/post/31321

  • by Shadonototra on 4/16/22, 7:59 PM

    The question is not to "trust"

    The question is how to hide your online fingerprint

    Everyone is your enemy, you can only count on yourself, either self host a crawler

    Or use the most popular one, if results aren't good, check with another one

    Remove your dependencies, and change your identity

    Anything else is USELESS, expecting a VC funded company in the USA will care for your privacy, is like asking for a thief to not rob you

    Google gives 0 shit about you, you are just data, manipulate it

  • by disadvantage on 4/16/22, 4:26 PM

    Self hosted Searx[0].

    Or another approach: use multiple search engines + an anonymous proxy. Spread your searches among Qwant, Mojeek, Ecosia, Yacy, Swisscows, etc

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searx

  • by ColinHayhurst on 4/17/22, 10:26 AM

  • by sylware on 4/16/22, 5:19 PM

    qwant main founder is a shady microsoft zealot and was in trouble for weird stuff (dunno how it did turn out). AFAIK, qwant is running ads from the advertisment company of microsoft like duckduckgo. It is said qwant mostly use bing as its backend (they have small indexing engine/web crawler on their own though, but not main).

    Usually, when something online is "free", follow the _real_ money: which advertisment company is making money out of it? is user data sold to brokers? is there a fund behind it financing (vanguard/blackrock/etc)?

  • by tintedfireglass on 4/17/22, 3:00 AM

    How about a decentralized search engine like https://yacy.net/

  • by chasil on 4/16/22, 3:46 PM

    Why do you need to trust any of them?