How do I find out which "mixed" licenses DuckDuckGo is running under in GNUIceCat?
Hello,
I am a new user of Trisquel 7.0. I just got it installed for the first time on my laptop and I chose to use GNUIceCat as my browser of choice since it asked me if I'd like to switch after I finished installing it. I see that it uses DuckDuckGo as it's default search engine. I also see on Wikipedia that DuckDuckGo runs under a "mixed" license, whereas IxQuick and Startpage run under a "proprietary" license. All three are provided in IceCat's drop down menu of search engines. How does one find out exactly which "mixed" licenses DuckDuckGo uses exactly?
I guess I won't be using IxQuick or Startpage for my search engine since they are running under a proprietary license. The whole reason I started using Trisquel in the first place was so I could start using software under a GNU GPL license and with all proprietary pieces of software removed. Now I don't want to start using a search engine that runs under a proprietary license- that would seem counter productive, wouldn't it?
Thanks
You do not run a search engine. You only query it and read the results it outputs. The one who deserves the control of the search engine is who owns it: Surfboard Holdings B.V. (in case of Ixquick and Startpage) and DuckDuckGo, Inc. If they only run free software or software they wrote themselves, then good for them. That does not make much of a difference to you.
And using search engine neither is not SaaS (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html):
Services such as search engines collect data from around the web and let you examine it. Looking through their collection of data isn't your own computing in the usual sense—you didn't provide that collection—so using such a service to search the web is not SaaSS.
May be you are looking for something like this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy
Find more "Open"source search engines in a list by Wikipedia here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines#Open_source_search_engines
By querying a search engine's database for information, you are not
'running' it, but merely sifting through the data you requested from it.
The search engine's servers have already collected this data, and so
requesting information from a server isn't SaaS, as pointed out by
lcerf. If they run proprietary software, that only impacts their
freedom, not yours. The only issue with search engines is privacy- and
GNU like DuckDuckGo for a reason.
> The only issue with search engines is privacy- and
GNU like DuckDuckGo for a reason.
Ruben and some other people in the free software community may like DuckDuckGo, but saying "GNU likes DuckDuckGo" is misleading. It's not like DuckDuckGo is the officially approved search engine by the free software community. I think DuckDuckGo is bad for privacy and there are better alternatives, such Seeks and Searx instances. We had a discussion on this recently: https://trisquel.info/en/forum/searx-metasearch-engine
I am a translator!
I use https://searx.me
hidden instance: http://www.ulrn6sryqaifefld.onion/
..... your hidden instance link doesn't work.
It's a Tor hidden service. You have to be using Tor to access it.
Oh, I see. I haven't gotten that far yet with Trisquel or Tor yet.
The problem with DuckDuckGo is that it's highly centralized, just like Google is - everyone connects to one provider, which means all search queries can be logged in one centralized database and associated with you. The same problem is true with Ixquick and Startpage.
Seeks and Searx are much better, because anyone can provide instances, so not everything can be logged by one centralized provider - search queries are more distributed. YaCy may be even better, but I not familiar with it in practice. See: https://trisquel.info/en/forum/searx-metasearch-engine
I believe YaCy is supposed to eliminate tracking and censorship. I have tried it for a short while. It was nice and appeared to work well, except that the results were generally very bad and uncomparable to those of DuckDuckGo and the likes.
To which the fanatics say- freedom over convenience.