Heard some sketchy stuff about duckduckgo recently, found out about start page.many users?
I used it for a bit. For a supposedly privacy focused search engine, they sure dislike when users connect through a VPN. I’m met with constant identity checks and, with certain queries, straight up access denied pages. Selling the company to an ad agency is another massive red flag. It’s unfortunate since we’re starved for decent, free search options these days, but skip them.
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I heard they were caught selling search data to Microsoft.
Iirc it was the mobile browser not blocking Microsoft trackers. Lemme check
Edit: can confirm, it was not blocking MS trackers, seems to have been due to legal terms. Link: https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-scripts/
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There’s proof they allowed Microsoft to use trackers though…I dig DDG as they were one of the first functional alternative search engines to Google with an emphasis on privacy, yet there are much better options today. I’m going to have to peep kagi based on this thread, but I’ll need to be strongly convinced to switch from SearXNG.
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Being an accident would be news to me. Since it sources Bing for results, you’d think Microsofts trackers would be a focal point of their privacy approach. Sleeping on trackers known to be present isn’t a good look either way.
I used it for quite a while
I switched to kagi recently and never been happier
I scatter my data across ALL the search engines. Run multiple browsers (four different Firefox instances alone, including mobile), and use a different search engine in each. Also uBlockOrigin. The online data they all have on me is…incomplete.
I use it for some time now and all my browsers. I am surprised it does not have more users. In my opinion it’s easier to find what you want with startpage than duckduckgo
Because Start page uses Google results, DDG uses Bing.
Might want to consider hosting your own Whoogle instance instead?
Most search engines that claim to be private (StartPage, Qwant, etc) are fake and will try their hardest to sneakily profit from user data, with DuckDuckGo being the greatest example as they were caught selling user data to Microsoft, only stopping so when they were caught. The only search engine I would recommend is SearXNG. It’s feature rich and is primarily ran by privacy enthusiasts.
Nowhere in that article does it say they were selling data to Microsoft…
I’m really put off by the fact a privacy centered search engine would require captcha for VPN users. It was annoying to use on MullvadVPN.
Go to MetaGer
