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

[bratak]

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... :-(

[bratak]

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

https://lemmy.ml/post/31321

[Shadonototra]

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

[bratak]

I see your point, and you're right.

But it's so cumbersome to increase the "walls of privacy" endlessly, when privacy is our right. But that's the world we live in, right?

Let's say I use the following to protect myself, my fingerprint - there are questionmarks too to use them:

TOR: - I read that a huge fleet of exit nodes are bad. Probably the Gov. who's paying Millions to infiltrate the network. So, can I really hide my ass using TOR?

VPN: - Same as with any other service. You must trust them that they respect your privacy, don't save data etc.

Blockers/Firerwalls: - One needs technical skills to configure it properly. Luckily I'm able to, but millions of ordianry people don't.

It never ends.

So we have to do our part on our side and learn to live with it, and handle technology better than they do.

Thanks for your comment, very much appreciated.

[disadvantage]

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

[bratak]

Very good idea too.

I like the idea of selfhosting and the proxy.

Thank you very much.

[ColinHayhurst]

Mojeek and Gigablast, but I'm biased on the first one. Independent takes:

https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...

https://restoreprivacy.com/private-search-engine/

[sylware]

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)?

[bratak]

Yep, that's exactly what I mean.

It looks good, but behind the curtain...

Thanks for your feedback.

[sylware]

yeah, their internal web crawler/indexing engine are only for posture. It seems this main founder was maintaining a toxic work culture in order to keep this internal software mostly useless and keep funneling money to microsoft advertisement company (cf duckduckgo) and creating trafic for bing.

Well, that was how it looked at the time. As I said, I dunno how it ended, if it did.

[tintedfireglass]

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

[bratak]

Woa,that looks great.

One can even contribute by hosting a server if I understand this correct.

I'l check it out. Thanks very much.

[chasil]

Why do you need to trust any of them?

[jpeizer]

There are some things that maybe you would like to research but are a super private matter. Let’s say you want to research an STD you think you might have. Or let’s say your pregnant and don’t want others to know yet. Trust in a company means you trust to not share this information. Not used as possible ads for creams and baby formula. Especially if you are unsure of either and don’t want somebody else that may use the same computer to know.

[chasil]

For questions like this, use Tor browser. Tor clients route your connection through 3 hosts (a guard node, a relay node, and an exit node), and the last two will not know who or where you are.

Tor browser also has an incognito/private mode, at least on my Lineage Android and Ubuntu desktop. Set a desktop shortcut to incognito, and never use the mode that retains cookies.

Google does not like to talk to exit nodes, and will throw lots of captchas. If you want to search with Google on Tor, use startpage.com instead.

DDG, Ecosia, and others are really just Bing in disguise.

I'm not sure how friendly some of the other boutique search engines are to Tor. Malicious actors can use exit nodes to launch attacks, although I think safeguards have improved over the years.

I wrote an article on Tor for Linux and Android a few years back, and it has some more detail that might be useful. Let me know if you want the url.