Privacy search engines.
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Hello. I am looking for free software search engines that also give privacy.
Could someone reccomend me some?
Thanks
SearXNG through Tor Browser?
You can also install Searx on Trisquel.
Magic Banana, unfortunately we may have to call it duckduckwent.
I think it was sold and absorbed a while ago, but it would be good to confirm it, to be sure this IS the case and to let people know (one way or the other).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo mentions no such thing.
Magic Banana, the original info I read sometime ago is no longer anywhere to be found on the web, but during my search I found the article linked below, and would love to hear your thoughts about it. DDG has puzzled me for a long time now.
https://techrights.org/o/2020/07/02/ddg-privacy-abuser-in-disguise/
Coincidentally, I talked about that yesterday, in the Troll Lounge:
What I hate is articles making up problems that do not exist (or do not exist anymore), relying on vague statements or plain lies or ad-hominem attacks or...
https://trisquel.info/forum/rust-flash-player-emulator-thing-and-nobody-told-me?page=1#comment-175724
The article you point to does that. The first paragraph is only ad-hominem attacks. The second paragraph starts with a broken link. Its second link points to an issue that was fixed four years ago ( https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/pull/878 ). Its third link is broken. Its fourth link deals with a random user (named 9jnc7) pretending on a forum that DDG does fingerprinting and the CEO replying that "the accusation is simply wrong". End of the story. The fifth link refers to literally half a line in a news letter, mentioning an accidental blacklisting of the now-defunct Framabee search engine. Then we have https://stallman.org/articles/duckduckgo-censorship.html written by RMS. He explains in two addendums (because he is honest, contrary to Techrights) that the censorship he reported does not really exist, that it is not DuckDuckGo's fault but is inherited from Yahoo. The two following links are broken. The next one pretends that https://spreadprivacy.com is on CloudFlare. It is not, as far as I understand. Then, the article attacks Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo. They are named DuckDuckGo's partners, what probably only means that DuckDuckGo retrieves results the search engines of those companies. Finally, the article attacks the FOSDEM 2018 because it allocated space for DuckDuckGo, the Tor project because it accepted a donation (that the article calls a "bribe") from DuckDuckGo, and the EFF because it promotes DuckDuckGo.
As you see: the article is a pure waste of time. Unfortunately, those huge lists of terrible "arguments", which are typical of conspiracy theorists, convince some people. They do not waste their time, as I have just done (just this time, please...), and think that "there must be at least some of the listed arguments, apparently backed with references (the links), that must make the point of the author (here, that "People Should Never Ever Use DuckDuckGo"). Well, no.
In my opinion, the best to do is to identify those conspiracy-theory sources and to ignore them. Techrights is one of them. DigDeeper, referenced in this thread, is another one. It is pretty easy to see. Indeed, here is DigDeeper's main grief against DuckDuckGo: https://digdeeper.club/images/ddg_moonlanding.png
Thank you for checking the article so thoroughly, Magic Banana. I promise I'll try my bestest to not waste your time again!
Thank all of you. I will use SearX with my custom configuration.
Searx is what I have always recommended to people who seriously want libre software. Duckduckgo, is one I rarely if ever use.
If I am desperate and searx is driving me crazy, which happens almost never to this degree, then yeah.
I mean there are like 20+ good instances of searx with A+ ratings and at least 10 of those have secure ratings.
What about swisscows.com ?
Have been using it for a while and quite like it :)
I am surprised to see that Duckduckgo is still a privacy-keeping search engine as I noticed that when I query using abrowser's default search feature in the address bar links in the search results look like
https://duckduckgo.com/l/?uddg=https://trisquel.info/&rut=hash-unique-identifier
I did not think I was the only seeing this, but now I am unsure.
Somebody recently asked on Reddit and was replied this:
/l/?uddg= is a for private link redirection. Without it, i.e. if you just clicked http://some-url.com in the results, the remote site you visit would see your search terms in the referrer header if you did your search via a GET.
Its not to track, its a feature to add more privacy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1abpnm3/why_the_luddghttp_buggery_at_all/
https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1o61ld/duckduckgo_is_routing_my_clicks/ is an older question about the uddg parameter. It was replied by different users, essentially writing the same thing:
The real purpose of that is to prevent infoplease.com from seeing what you were searching for before you arrived. If your referring URL is duckduckgo.com/q=egypt (or some much more embarrassing search), they can use that information to build a profile on you (or highlight your search terms on their page, or various other things like that). DDG uses this extra layer of indirection to protect you, not to track you (as explicitly stated in their terms of service ).
and:
This is done so that DuckDuckGo can strip the referer header from your click when loading the search result. If you want to prevent both the referer header from being sent and from your clicks being routed through that link, you can use https://duckduckgo.com/html/
I personally use the HTML version.
I have heard some youtubers comment that duckduckgo can no longer be trusted or is asking suspiciously.
This youtuber seems to think otherwise:
https://viewtube.io/watch?v=CYYEwNc8Eaw
I am not sure whether to this happened though. I tend to think not, until I see more info. But still, the mainstream ones are just... really bad.
Consider what i said on the top sentence of this post as here-say for now, same with the video.
I am not sure whether to this happened though.
It happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#2020s gives that more journalistic reference: https://www.pcmag.com/news/duckduckgos-browser-wont-block-microsofts-trackers
The incident does not relate to DuckDuckGo's search service, but to DuckDuckGo's Web browser and to DuckDuckGo's Web browser extensions: they were blocking Amazon/Google/Facebook/etc.'s third-party trackers but not Microsoft's. That was fixed 2.5 months after, as both the news article (in an "update") and Wikipedia explain. At that occasion, DuckDuckGo gave some explanations: https://spreadprivacy.com/more-privacy-and-transparency/
Someone in the comments actually said something to that effect. Thanks for letting me know that this is indeed what happened.
It seems that I now know it was a web browser issue.
Very strange that such an issue occurred but such anomalies happen more probably than I know.
One nice thing about SearXNG is that you can use "bangs" to give you the results from another search engine. So if you want the DuckDuckGo results you can search like "!ddg trisquel GNU/Linux", and it should return you the results you would get if you were using DuckDuckGo directly.
In my experience SearXNG will give the same results as DuckDuckGo when using the '!ddg' at the start of the search phrase. Some of the results may be in a different order, but it looks like the same results to me.
Also if you ever need to see what a Google search result will be, you can use the '!go' bang at the start of the search phrase on SearXNG, and it will return the results without passing your info through to Google and without you having to go to a non-free search engine like Startpage to see Google results.
A cool thing is that you can chain bangs together. So, for example, "!map !ddg !wp paris" will give you a SearXNG page with results about Paris from openstreetmaps, from DuckDuckGo, and from Wikipedia all together.
"We’ve had bangs since 2008" -- https://duckduckgo.com/bangs.
>"We’ve had bangs since 2008" -- https://duckduckgo.com/bangs."
Yeah, but DuckDuckGo isn't free software, which was one half of the original question. It spurred me to look into how I can get my beloved DuckDuckGo search results while using free software AND while enhancing privacy. SearXNG with the !ddg bang is one way to do that. Switching your SearXNG search engine to only using DuckDuckGo would be another way.
Another privacy aspect of SearXNG is that there are instances that are outside of the 14-eyes spy agreement nations, such as https://searxng.ch/ in Switzerland.
I am a translator!
DuckDuckGo isn't free software
You are not running DuckDuckGo on your own computer, and when you use SearXNG, you anyway get DuckDuckGo doing the same processing.
Another privacy aspect of SearXNG is that there are instances that are outside of the 14-eyes spy agreement nations
Is that better than using DuckDuckGo onion via Tor?
You are not running DuckDuckGo on your own computer, and when you use SearXNG, you anyway get DuckDuckGo doing the same processing.
That is true for the search engine. When it comes to DuckDuckGo's applications and browser extensions, many (all?) are free software: https://github.com/duckduckgo
In particular, DuckDuckGo's Web browser is on F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.duckduckgo.mobile.android/
>"You are not running DuckDuckGo on your own computer, and when you use SearXNG, you anyway get DuckDuckGo doing the same processing."
I'm responding to the original post: "Hello. I am looking for free software search engines that also give privacy."
DuckDuckGo is clearly not a "free software search engine". SearXNG is a free software meta-search engine. According to Wikipedia, there currently are NO free software search engines for the general web since Gigablast dissolved 11 months ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_search_engines, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigablast
Apparently the Brave search engine might someday be released under a free software license, although it is currently proprietary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_Search
[Note: Wikipedia is not my favorite source of information, but I don't know anywhere else that is currently listing the software licenses for the search engines.]
With all the above in mind, it seems like our best current option is to use a free software proxy for proprietary search, like we do with invidious and piped for youtube videos. And SearXNG seems to be the most robust of the free software metasearch engines which offers some degree of privacy for the user.
>"Is that better than using DuckDuckGo onion via Tor?"
I don't know, that's a good question with a lot of variables. For instance, are you searching for clear web stuff via DuckDuckGo's onion instance, or for darkweb stuff? Seems like it would be most private if you weren't jumping from the DuckDuckGo onion instance to the clear web and back and forth. Certainly sending your data through a non-14-eyes nation should be better privacy than openly searching in a country like America where the government routinely conducts mass surveillance of internet traffic. But the DuckDuckGo onion instance may be better.
With the OP's focus on privacy, it could be that the OP was concerned about this privacy aspect of nonfree network services. From the network services article by Stallman:
>"if the service holds private information, users might be concerned that nonfree programs on the server might have back doors allowing someone else to see their data. In effect, nonfree programs on the server require users to trust those programs' developers as well as the service operator. How significant this is in practice depends on the details, including what jobs the nonfree programs do."
Not only is SearXNG robust but the code has also been subject to an impressive degree of inspection and review. SearXNG code has 219 different contributors on github and 856 forks and users have raised over 1,100 issues. With such active development and review in the open, people such as the OP may feel that using SearXNG as a network service reduces the chance of someone using an unknown back door to their data.
I remember from a YouTube video that basically all search engines use google's results, apart from Brave.
Which would make Brave better to use in the long term.
What do you guys think/know about this?
And yeah, I thought Brave was free, but it's not?
Probably it depends what is being leaked whether search results from any given platform say, google for example... that tells us whether its a problem to have google results used by search engines.
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