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Comment by pb7 | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo is mostly Bing.

They have a bunch of own infrastructure and data these days (I have read they don't use Bing at all now).

Besides: It's cleaner, faster, has often useful instant answers (random, 10011001 in hex, 1 btc in xmr, 40 stones in kg), bangs (!g for Google, !gh for GitHub, !yt for YouTube, !w for Wikipedia) and actually respects your privacy.

I think this feature could be much improved an expanded, but the location context switch is a really cool thing as well.

>and actually respects your privacy.

According to who?

DDG is a privately-owned, for-profit corporation, whose code is closed source and doesn't undergo independent audits or validations of privacy.

Their only selling point is privacy, so I feel like they have an incentive to keep their only lifeline going. If they break their promise it’s essentially the end of their business as they don’t have anything else compelling.

Most other companies can get away with violating your privacy because they have something nobody else has (either because their product is so good or because of network effects) so you have no choice but to keep using them. DDG doesn’t have that luxury.

Which further begs the question as to why they haven't taken steps to validate something so valuable to them. Even Google open-sourced Chromium.

DDG is just a reskin of Bing (and Yandex search). They don't have anything to lose if they violate your privacy - they can just pop up again under a different name.

> If they break their promise it’s essentially the end of their business as they don’t have anything else compelling.

I'd love to give them credit but without transparent proof of security, all I read here is "they are very motivated to hide any selling of data that they are doing.

This only incentivizes them to maintain this image until they hit critical mass, hurt competitors (Google), or come up with compelling reasons to use them. After all, half the discussion below is how Google used to not be evil but now is; what is stopping DDG from changing their tune later?

Not saying they can’t turn evil later on down the line when they do get big, but at the moment it’s (IMO) a non issue. They would lose their entire business (whatever little they have) immediately if they did so and presumable make less money out of the attempt than they make right now by respecting user privacy and only offering content-targeted ads. For now I’m happy to trust them - this can of course change in the future.

It's not, it's one of the selling points. Ignoring the privacy thing there are still plenty of reasons to use it, besides it just being a non-dominant player, which is an inherent plus in my book.

> I have read they don't use Bing at all now

Got a link I can take a look at?

> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.[0]

Yahoo is also powered by Bing last I checked.

[0] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

Here’s one: https://trypap.com/

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