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by sq_ 2375 days ago
> DDG, Startpage and such, on the current instantiation, they are proxies to someone else search-backend.

Does this remain true for DuckDuckGo? I was under the impression that they used to be that way, but that they had switched over to using their own search backend some time ago.
1 comments
solso 2375 days ago
You can check for yourself, Bing seems to the the user agent... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22my+user+agent%22&t=h_&ia=web
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brunoff 2375 days ago
wow, what a shame! i didn't know that. in their defense I at least try to consider that those may be old database entries, and newer ones would not be like that anymore, but ddg filtering capabilities are weak, making it hard to prove that point.

ddg doesn't have date filtering search syntax like google has, for example "before:2018-12-31", they offer only a few date filtering options shown on a combo.

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solso 2374 days ago
No, I would not call it a shame, and I think that no-one should either. In fact, what DDG does is admirable IMHO.

First, they do not hide that they aggregate. It's fanboys that tend to overextend DDG's capabilities, not them (at least for best of my knowledge).

And second, given the resources they have, they are doing more than enough, and they do provide a great service. It might not solve the underlying problem of privacy, but at least it helps protecting the privacy of those people using it.

To sum up, I do not think it's fair to bash DDG for aggregating.

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