DuckDuckGo sold out?

[AlwaysHope]

Not everything is a conspiracy (fact checkers in particular I do not believe are "bought" for a second, this is a new fake news age narrative), but there are conspiracies that have done the world significant harm in the past decade. Absolute freedom of speech online has proven harmful to society, as humans are mostly too dumb to choose fact from fiction when they prefer the fiction. That's really as far into this as I can go.

Political opinions don't tend to be profitable, but keeping society stable does tend to be. Fact checkers operate in that realm, where facts work, 2+2=4, and society can stand on it's head without believing there are child sex farms on the moon. The interest is a publicly shared one.

Leaving this here:

The Conspiracy Chart 2021

conspiracychart.com

Thank God your world view of what humans should believe or not, was not shared during the middle ages when Copernicus proposed that the Sun revolves around the Earth & not the other way round like the prevailing view was. Suppressing free speech is a highway to ignorance.

 

[DrCR]

No Qwant users here?

A European tech peer mentioned it a while back, and I didn’t bother to try since ddg worked for me, but recently I found ddg has gone crazy on their filtering.

Thank God your world view of what humans should believe or not, was not shared during the middle ages when Copernicus proposed that the Sun revolves around the Earth & not the other way round like the prevailing view was. Suppressing free speech is a highway to ignorance.

You’re not giving the Roman Catholic Church enough credit, for example, considering they were literally burning people alive at times.

 

[80251]

Some countries still regularly execute people for practicing witchcraft and sorcery right now, in the 21st century.

 

[MarsM4N]

Yes. They openly admitted they're fully on board for 'controlling misinformation', and soon after even more aggressively were censoring search results.

I have no single preference search engine any longer:
For technical things and products, Google is hard to beat. For everything else, every single search engine (that I've tried) is utterly broken or non-functional.

It all went downhill when Google allowed corporations and even individuals to flag search results. It's really time for a open source search engine, without censorship.

 

[Minxie]

DuckDuckGo was never good in the first place. Virtue Signaling: The Search Engine.

 

[eidairaman1]

't matter, they filter search results based on their political ideology. I chopped them off several months ago.

Google does that for sure

 

[R-T-B]

Thank God your world view of what humans should believe or not, was not shared during the middle ages when Copernicus proposed that the Sun revolves around the Earth & not the other way round like the prevailing view was. Suppressing free speech is a highway to ignorance.

Technically Copernicus was still wrong. Everything orbits (or rather, is attracted to) everything, that is simply a matter of frame of reference, and a very bad example for your point. Also Copernicus did get flak for his belief at the time, mostly from the Church.

I could make you a geocentric solar system map today, and amazingly, it's still accurate. Not exactly as usable for interplanetary travel, but 100% accurate. Heck, I can do it in seconds on any PC. NASA even uses such charts still for transits to and from the moon.

PS: You're talking to the author of the solar system simulator for KSP aptly called "Kopernicus" so I might be quiet on n-body issues if I were you. Even NASA has used my work in subprojects before.

I used to be an advocate for no restrictions free speech, but time and again the last decade has shown us that is the real highway to ignorance.

 

[qubit]

Why am I not surprised. I was always very skeptical that they were the privacy heroes that they made themselves out to be. Even good old Mozilla, campaigning for privacy online and a free internet is funded in large part by Google. There's just no getting away from it.

This is why when I saw that search results were better on Google, I just stuck with that. What good is privacy anyway, if the search engine doesn't find the content? Again, Content is King. An annoying phrase, but very true.

 

[The red spirit]

No Qwant users here?

Me. I actually used it quite a bit in FF. I like it more than DDG, but it's integration into browsers is bad and picture search doesn't work with arrow keys. If not those two things, I would switch from DDG, but unfortunately... I have tried many other search engines too, also "private" ones too and imo Qwant has a chance to. It doesn't really have any big flaws, search results are good, also it's in EU, meaning it will be forced to respect EU privacy laws that are the best. so I guess it also passes my completely unprofessional test. Also I love that they made their own web crawler, that alone makes it a very worthy search engine. It also looks or well looked really neat, now it's quite meh, but otherwise it doesn't look like some amateur IT project or some conspiracy site from 90s. My moronic search for different search engines has basically concluded that DDG and Qwant were the best, but I also root for Naver even if I know that it's too niche and won't take off ever. Easily the worst search engine I have ever seen was Yahoo. It's not that the search itself is bad, but holy shit that privacy consent was really really bad. People dump on Google, Amazon MS or whatever, but Yahoo is on its own level of just completely and blatantly not giving a shit about privacy. They don't even hide it, they show that that they defecate on it for green and they love it and you better suck it up also while their spying Alibaba with 10 thieves are stealing from you left and right. That was a major turn off for me and never ever went back on to Yahoo, not even for testing. It's almost like yahoo's CEO just decided to build the most spyware stuffed website humanly imaginable completely unironically.

I just went back to Yahoo out of curiosity and damn, motherfucker made uBlock Origin to just curl up in corner and cry. Over 200 trackers/ads/spywares, really what in the fuck is wrong with Yahoo people? I swear to god, Yahoo search is easily the worst website on internet. The vilest digital crap in universe.

 

[R-T-B]

Why am I not surprised. I was always very skeptical that they were the privacy heroes that they made themselves out to be.

This is a case of censorship, not a privacy violation per se. Just pointing that out.

Edit: reading the host article it actually appears to be both, and always has been since day 1. Not surprising but a little dissapointing.

 

[Selaya]

[ ... ]

I used to be an advocate for no restrictions free speech, but time and again the last decade has shown us that is the real highway to ignorance.

methinks the solution would be fixing the latter rather than crippling the former.

 

[R-T-B]

methinks the solution would be fixing the latter rather than crippling the former.

How do you do that? You got some human genome edits you want to share?

 

[The red spirit]

and always has been since day 1. Not surprising but a little dissapointing.

I guess that would be true with any meta crawler. If they don't crawl web themselves, there's no way they can ensure privacy and another big thing is that any tech company needs to make cash, privacy doesn't sell, so they have to get creative about ways to sell you out. There won't be any private search engine, until you have to sign up for subscription, else there will be an obvious conflict of interest.

 

[Selaya]

How do you do that? You got some human genome edits you want to share?

i dont believe it's quite that bleak; fundamentally this is something that can (and should) be fixed at an education level - like, beating basic stuff like dunning-kruger into people (amongst others, but that'd be a topic for itself)

 

[R-T-B]

i dont believe it's quite that bleak; fundamentally this is something that can (and should) be fixed at an education level - like, beating basic stuff like dunning-kruger into people (amongst others, but that'd be a topic for itself)

That is of course, possible, and I'm willing to entertain the idea if I believed such funding were possible. Sadly in the states that's more bleak than genome edits some days.

 

[80251]

GULAG should just practice truth in advertising and change their motto to what their corporate attitude really is: "BE EVIL".

 

[DrCR]

I also root for Naver even if I know that it's too niche and won't take off ever.

Could you elaborate a bit on that? And is there an english version of their search page?

 

[The red spirit]

Could you elaborate a bit on that? And is there an english version of their search page?

Not much to elaborate, but they seem to have made a their own web crawler and I love that a lot. Frankly that's my main reason for liking them. I just think that we have a lack of truly separate web crawlers and if you have one, you have potential to find some info that others miss. That can be extremely valuable. And the thing is that Naver functions outside of SK and it works reasonably well. Also their search is fast and website looks sleek. Perhaps the most important bit is that Naver is probably the most successful search engine after Google, because unlike many others they managed to reach 74% market share in SK. meaning they have what it takes to basically become monopoly. Now I don't want another monopoly, but it shows that Naver is powerful and has a ton of potential. And such level of success is truly astonishing, neither Yahoo Japan neither Yandex RU have reached anywhere near 70% of market, I frankly have never seen something like that before. Obviously things like Bing may be "better", but their users are spread around globe and therefore that may indicate that it's not really great search engine. Of course you can say that Chinese Baidu also has 74% marketshare, but China isn't free market and government is above all. They can push even really inferior search engine to the moon if they wanted to and China have ruined their reputation with spyware and near zero consideration for privacy and some other things, as well as strong desire to control information, therefore anything Chinese can't be trusted for unbiased and uncensored search or that they won't install some spyware on your PC and sell your weirdest fetishes for yuans. Therefore Naver remains so far the biggest domestic search engine success so far in free market and free world.

 

[DrCR]

Naver was already on my radar as a 'local boy made good' story, but I concluded in my late 20s that I'd realistically never actually learn a foreign language despite learning bits of some, including in formal education settings. So without an British Empire / Former Colonies language option, Naver can have no direct effect on my life. (Native english speaker is both a blessing and a curse in a world where it's solidly, for better or worse the lingua franca.)

 

[Steevo]

I use ff with ddg

I did too, then when I realized that MS was buying user data and search data and it’s pretty easily linked to your MS account it was back to Google for most searches and incognito mode through a VPN on FF with all the blockers running and sandbox mode, only a VM would make it more secure, which may be the next up option for anonymous browsing and checking prices etc…

 

[The red spirit]

Naver was already on my radar as a 'local boy made good' story, but I concluded in my late 20s that I'd realistically never actually learn a foreign language despite learning bits of some, including in formal education settings. So without an British Empire / Former Colonies language option, Naver can have no direct effect on my life. (Native english speaker is both a blessing and a curse in a world where it's solidly, for better or worse the lingua franca.)

I certainly don't expect anyone to learn Hangul for Naver. That's why I said they have potential, but they have to realize it first. But still if you just want to try it out, you can just type what you want in search field.

 

[mplayerMuPDF]

No Qwant users here?

A European tech peer mentioned it a while back, and I didn’t bother to try since ddg worked for me, but recently I found ddg has gone crazy on their filtering.


You’re not giving the Roman Catholic Church enough credit, for example, considering they were literally burning people alive at times.

“Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people” ― Heinrich Heine

I use QWant along with DDG (sometimes I use Startpage with a DDG bang). Neither are perfect but definitely way better than Google.

It all went downhill when Google allowed corporations and even individuals to flag search results. It's really time for a open source search engine, without censorship.

View attachment 254159

It all went wrong when the DMCA was passed in the first place... But what can you do about corrupting influence of big money in a country where that type of corruption is legalized?

Thank God your world view of what humans should believe or not, was not shared during the middle ages when Copernicus proposed that the Sun revolves around the Earth & not the other way round like the prevailing view was. Suppressing free speech is a highway to ignorance.

Don't you know that today's censors and their masters are infinitely more enlightened?

 

[R-T-B]

Don't you know that today's censors and their masters are infinitely more enlightened?

Say what you will about the scientific method, but it's the best we got at the moment. And it does encourage well-founded dissent.

 

[mplayerMuPDF]

Say what you will about the scientific method, but it's the best we got at the moment.

because the scientific method is applied to literally everything...

 

[R-T-B]

because the scientific method is applied to literally everything...

It is applied to the terms "fact" and by proxy most "fact checkers"

Beyond that there be dragons... my reply was mostly to the guy who was humorously challenging me with the Copernicus example... despite that probably being the worst example on earth he could have picked.