[abc-xyz]

Also worth mentioning they're closed-source, US-based and for-profit. Why exactly do people trust them? Simply because they write a few articles/ads saying "privacy is important"?

If you're willing to sacrifice search quality for privacy, as in switching from Google to DuckDuckGo, then you might as well take a step further and switch from Google to Searx/Ask.Moe.

[im3w1l]

> Why exactly do people trust them?

Because they have a good privacy policy. They would face legal consequences if they were lying. Nation state actors can presumably override privacy polices but it's better than nothing.

[jeltz]

The reason I use them is not because I trust them but because they do not put me in my own search bubble like Google does. I hate that part of using Google. Also as a bonus I do not get any AMP results.

[kjaftaedi]

Never heard of searx .. attempted to use it.

I couldn't figure out which searx instance to use and found no good way of knowing who to trust, most of the engines i used were broken and telling me to find another searx engine.

It looks like it's pulling most of its info from duckduckgo anyway.

Personally I'd rather trust a known entity than an unknown entity anyday, especially when the unknown entity is slow, complicated, buggy and broken in many places.

[abc-xyz]

They’re pulling info from all the other search engines, not just DuckDuckGo. FYI DuckDuckGo is also pulling their results from other search engines, the only difference is that DuckDuckGo aren’t being blocked/rate-limited by them, presumably because they’re paying for API access.

If you hosted your own instance then it would be a lot more reliable since the IP wouldn’t send a suspiciously high amount of requests.

As for your trust argument, I couldn’t disagree more. You choose to trust DuckDuckGo, who happens to be closed source, because of their branding. The same way people trust/trusted Google/Apple/etc. because of theirs. This thread is a perfect example why being open source is the most important thing for any privacy service (because otherwise this privacy leak likely wouldn’t have been discovered, and people wouldn’t have known that the company so carelessly violate people’s privacy and fail to correct it when people point it out.. it should really make you wonder what’s happening in the search engines codebase).

[leereeves]

As a DDG user I don't feel like I'm sacrificing anything. Two sets of results are better than one (I can see Google results by adding !g, which I do less than once per day on average) and, ironically, DDG bangs are the easiest way to use even Google services like Translate and Scholar.

[itsmeamario]

Same for me. Privacy is why I came, bangs are the reason I stay.

[abc-xyz]

Ask.Moe also support bangs (I know !g and !gt works, not sure about scholar). Searx doesn’t but I imagine they’d gladly accept a pull request for it.

[leereeves]

I don't know much about those search engines. What's the advantage of Ask.Moe or Searx?

[abc-xyz]

For me the fact that they’re open source. This thread is a prime example of why it’s so important. We really have no idea what DuckDuckGo is doing because they’re closed source. For all we know they could be forwarding users’ IP to Microsoft/Yandex/etc.

If you want to market yourself as a champion of privacy, then the absolute minimum criteria should in my opinion be that your codebase is open source.