this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
155 points (69.5% liked)
Privacy
32159 readers
758 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
DDG is not a search engine.
Why isn't it?
There is an actual duck doing the searching for you.
IP over Duck Carriers, also known as the IPoDC protocol
It uses Bing and Yahoo. All it does is anonymize the query before it’s sent to them.
Bing is a search engine. Yahoo is a search engine. Google Search is a search engine. DDG is just a broker in all this.
True, though this is a little out of date, DDG has built much of their own cache now. Bing is still their failover, but they've gotten a lot more independent. That said, I don't generally care for it's derivative-of-bing results, and has had some privacy oopsies lately that steer me away.
The way MS is moving, I really don’t want to keep using DDG if they are integral. I couldn’t really find much on the deal they made but DDG has done things for them that make me uneasy.
There's literally a column on the chart for that.
And Firefox is not a browser?
Edgy. DDG queries Bing and Yahoo mostly. All they do is anonymize the query before it’s sent to keep your searches private.
Show me the DDG search engine.
(Wikipedia)
Hence, not a search engine. Fucking downvoting clowns.
Hang on, I'm really trying to understand.
According to Wikpedia,
DDG operates a crawler just like that which is a characteristic of a search engine.
A search engine is defined by Webster as
Which is what DDG is and does. How is DDG not a search engine?
DDG talks to all the search engines. It uses tons of them. Everyone except Google it looks like.
Before sending the query on your behalf, they simply anonymize it. Then return the results. DDG doesn’t actually perform a single search. So how can it be a search engine??
I know this is splitting hairs but I don’t get what many of you are struggling with. DDG just talks to existing engines on your behalf.
That would mean pretty much none of the search engines on this list are search engines
Email them be ask them if they a search engine.
It does that, too, yes. But as I mentioned above it in fact does have its own web crawler and search algorithm, just like other search engines. It combines the results which makes DDG technically a true search engine, even though it improves its results by utilizing other search enignes, too. Shall we agree to this?
On one hand, you've provided sourced information with supporting details, and I've also successfully used DDG as a search engine.
On the other hand, ultratiem on Lemmy says it's not a search engine, so I don't know who to believe...