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Comment by bla2 | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo is mostly a skin on Bing search results. By using it, you're saying you trust Microsoft more than Google. If that's your intent, cool, but you're not really getting away from the big tech companies by doing this.

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Hardly. DuckDuckGo claims not to share my information or searches with Microsoft. I trust DuckDuckGo (not Microsoft) to keep their word.

The fact that DDG sources information about the internet from Microsoft is unimportant. I'm concerned about my personal information, not large scale manipulation of search results.

In that case you could use http://www.startpage.com - it's a wrapper around Google, and your information isn't shared with them.

I would use this if it weren't so darn slow.

I've tried searx instances as well, but couldn't find one that functioned consistent to my liking.

Recently I deactivated Javascript on Startpage (with uBO) and surprisingly it suddenly loads fast.

Believe it or not they are injecting all kinds of ad related JS.

I am even questioning their sincerity, since the page is badly optimized for usage.

Meh, if DDG takes off MS will likely either cut them off or charge, leading to DDG needing to run their own search. If they can do that is unproven, and if running a web-wide search engine with DDG's business model is profitable is unproven too. I agree it's irrelevant to users medium-term, but if you're happy with DDG you kind of have to hope they don't become too successful.

I'm pretty sure DDG is already paying them. Maybe they'll raise their rates, but DDG has other sources and has their own crawler, too, so I think they will do just fine.

DDG claim otherwise https://duck.co/help/results/sources

DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.

That links "more than 400 sources" to https://duck.co/ia which in turn links to https://docs.duckduckhack.com/#improve-a-live-instant-answer saying "DuckDuckHack is in Maintenance Mode". But https://docs.duckduckhack.com/welcome/how-ias-work.html suggests that these sources are for things displayed at the top, which I see super rarely.

Yahoo gets their search results from bing, so that's the same thing. So this supports my claim.

DDG also uses Yandex and Baidu search results in relevant regions:

https://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/09/26/dolphin-browser-goes-...

> By using it, you're saying you trust Microsoft more than Google

I do. They make inferior software imo, but seem a lot less suspicious.

Depends upon the software - you can pry Excel from my cold dead hands.

G Suite has definitely come a long way, but the Office suite of apps are absolutely the gold standard.

I thought they just partner with Bing for ad results - not that their search was a skin of Bing. Wikipedia supports the ad partnership but also doesn't say anything about Bing being responsible for their search results. And on the few tests I've just done searching both, I see similar but not exact results. Do you have a source for this claim?

See my reply to NeedMoreTea.

Duck Duck Go uses search result API's from various venders, including Bing- that is mentioned in the history section of the Wikipedia article. (Originally they used Yahoo's search API, and Yahoo of course changed to using results from Bing). They also have their own web crawler.

Does using DDG give Microsoft your personally-identifiable data?

To be clear, it does not.

Where is the open source internet search platform?

There’s an open source P2P-based distributed search engine called YaCy.

Check searx https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/

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