Is DuckDuckGo a good search engine?

[GreyGeek]

Sorry to ruin the party, but here's an interesting story about Startpage.: https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage...acy-one-group/

Saw that, and another link which suggested that a Chinese group has purchased an interest in StartPage. But, I don't know how true that is. Here is an interesting article about the "Best Private Search Engines".
It differentiates between "meta" search engines like DDG, StartPage, and the like which cycle Google, Bing or Yandex results, those last three being true search engines. Another true search engine, and one of my favorites, is MoJeek, which sends out its own crawlers. Don't forget SwissCows!
However, be careful of YaCy (pronouncedd "ya see"). It is a distributed, peer-to-peer search engine, meaning that you have to install a peer-to-peer system

YaCy is a peer-to-peer search engine and web crawler. Users install the software and become a “YaCy-peer”, volunteering their computer to independently crawl through the web, analyzing and indexing websites into a database shared by all Yacy peers. More than 400 million websites have been indexed by YaCy. There is no central server; the database is shared and upheld by the YaCy peers.

There are a few distinct advantages of a decentralized peer-to-peer search engine: since there is no central server or company who owns the service, the search results cannot be censored, and no incentives to prioritize results based on prospective contracts or advertising dollars.

A problem with YaCy revolves around your ISP's "ToS". Some forbid you from using your computer as an Internet server, which is what you are doing when you install a P2P system on your box. I've been unable to determine exactly which P2P engine YaCy uses, but photos of their pages looks very similar to the IPFS system, which I tested in Sept of 2017. Also, you don't know if one of your peers is using your machine to store porn because you can't see into it without the hash link to decrypt it. You'd be in a world of legal and financial troubles trying to prove yourself innocent. That's the main reason why I decided NOT to use P2P networks.

This image shows 840 IPFS peer connections to my laptop. My bandwidth on my 40Mbps connection was allowing me 500Kbps, and my laptop was equally slow.

[jglen490]

In my opinion, the biggest threat to each of us is not paying attention to what we click on. Browsers, email, etc., it's all the same.

[Goeroeboeroe]

Sorry to ruin the party, but here's an interesting story about Startpage.: https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage...acy-one-group/

[Fred47]

DDG is a front end to Bing. I prefer Google to Microsoft.

Well not wholly, it does use Bing but also several other sites plus their own scans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo You can test this out by doing a search in each and see the difference.

I've seen some of the other sites but there is some advanced features of DDG (bang) that I use and not ready to give them up, or learn new ones.

[jlittle]

A bit behind, I'm still a loyal DDG user. If there is another search engine (that isn't just a front end to Google) let us know.

DDG is a front end to Bing. I prefer Google to Microsoft.

[GreyGeek]

Startpage.com
Go to its settings page and create your setup. Instead of saving your settings in a cookie, copy the URL your settings create and paste it into your "Search" engine input text.
But then there is this. Using Google as a source for links isn't bad IF your personal info isn't passed along as part of the bargain.

And, there is searx, or, Qwant, or, Mojeek, or want a Russian search engine? Yandex

In fact, here is a list of 20 that you can use.

[Fred47]

A bit behind, I'm still a loyal DDG user. If there is another search engine (that isn't just a front end to Google) let us know.

[kenj70]

Holy smokes! Reading the techrights website is rather enlightening. Who can we trust these days? I feel like Diogenes, looking for an honest man.

[GreyGeek]

An interesting article raising some interestng questions:
http://techrights.org/2020/07/02/ddg...r-in-disguise/
I wasn't aware of the history of the DDG creator.