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Comment by RHSeeger | Hacker News Reader

Yes? They're completely different scenarios. One is setting the default search engine, the other is actively subverting the user's intention.

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The user’s intention is to proxy the search results so it is anonymized. Based on their chrome extension description it seems to do that. It works not unlike duckduckgo.

Spinning it as some Anti-Chinese national security thing is probably unnecessary.

I don't think they anonymize the search, they just send it directly to Bing or Google. Anonymizing the search wouldn't earn them any money.

How does it earn them any money to begin with? I know the article claimed they have a revenue of $250 million a year, but unless they are somehow injecting their own ads, how does a simple redirection result in any revenue for them?

They do inject their own ads

> [...] a search for “airpods” on Bing leads to a Search Encrypt search results page that has more ads than search results. A user would have to have the stamina to scroll through 10 text ads from Microsoft and then 5 image ads before coming to an organic search result

So is there an ad bidding system and marketplace they run with a separate user interface that requires ad buyers to login and purchase ads?

They use Bing for their search results and ads. Microsoft does all the work to onboard advertisers.

They kind of do. They are a proxy service, so your IP and browsers are hidden I assume. The search results are coming from Bing and Google.

the searches are logged to a server in China. They're not private

I can’t seem to access the article anymore but I recall it saying their concern was the potential for the privacy policy to be changed at any time. This concern would be true for any company.

Just having servers in China is not really much different from having servers in the US. The NSA probably logs more than it lets on.

it is clickbait with contemporary characteristics.

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