Am I missing something? Why using duckduckgo? The only mention I have seen of it is a paid ad they bought on reddit. Is there any reason they are better than the plethora of existing alternatives? Do they even maintain their own index, or are they a scraper?
My question was whether or not we should trust DuckDuckGo, not whether DuckDuckGo is more trustworthy than some alternatives, and not whether they collect less user-specific data than some alternatives.
My thinking is that there isn't much reason to trust them. I disagree that their business is built on them being trustworthy. Their business is built on people believing them trustworthy. This may act as a disincentive to act in an untrustworthy manner, but it is simply another factor for their cost-benefit analyses. Most companies benefit from appearing trustworthy, such as banks, but the unfortunate reality is that this doesn't mean that they will actually work in your best interest.
I wish people would stop thinking DuckDuckGo cares about your privacy. It's all marketing BS. The founder sold his old startup in 2006 to classmates.com, an incredibly scummy company.
DuckDuckGo most likely tracks everything users do. Their founder sold his previous startup along with all its user's data. Outside of the cozy story they spin, I don't know why users think this company is a champion of user privacy.
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).
he made big money in the past selling user data to the highest bidder. you can google all about it. I never understood why people trusted duckduckgo
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