Why People Should Never Ever Use DuckDuckGo (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Why People Should Never Ever Use DuckDuckGo (2020)

techrights.org

25 pointsjoshstr23 comments

The "Harmful Partnerships" section is a list of issues the author has with third-parties, not DDG. Guilt by association. I don't believe I could follow that logic in anything but very egregious cases as doing so would quickly eliminate my use of, well, anything. (The whole approach seems faulty to me in any case as it ignores context in those issues, and compartmentalization that occurs in those companies.)

The rest seem to be lacking context. The Censorship accusation takes me to a link that has an update from 6 years ago indicating that their crime is something inherited from an upstream search provider and not intentional. The other accusations are in some cases just that, "accused", or lacking context and necessary details to establish motive. Saying "read: bribe" to a contribution makes me feel the author has an axe to grind when it's follow by assumptions to people's motives and interests.

Overall, this reads like a stretch. It looks damning at a glance, but falls apart once you start looking at the details. Happy to read criticism of DDG if it exists, but I feel like this was an invented laundry list. Show me one really good reason why I shouldn't use DDG, instead of 100 questionable ones.

But I didn't know what searx was before now, so that's cool at least.

(Disclosure: I work for AWS, which is mentioned in the article. Views are my own, etc.)

> The "Harmful Partnerships" section is a list of issues the author has with third-parties, not DDG. Guilt by association.

That is literally Roy Schestowitz's entire thing, and it has been … since 2006, apparently. He's the idiot who harassed numerous free software developers for working on the Mono project (Ximian, then Novell, then Xamarin's alternative implementation of .NET; Xamarin was since acquired by Microsoft, fulfilling Roy's darkest prophecies, and nothing bad happened). His rabid blathering chased away contributors who were improving the Linux desktop and invited hostile, ugly people in their place.

He has not contributed anything remotely positive to the community for the entire history of his website. He is not a person who deserves an audience.

Not sure if this is meant to be taken seriously, but many of the observations outlined is both described and addressed here https://duckduckgo.com/privacy

Also, it seems the author lists his concerns and opinions without offering a solution. Does he think Google or Bing are better alternatives?

Reasons why I will continue to use DuckDuckGo:

- Google is even worse

- Bangs

It is really unfortunate that I use DDG simply because it is the least worst of the bunch, not because its terribly good.

I'd feel worse about it, but I've been using Firefox for the same reason for ages.

keyboard shortcuts

Making a new account here and this is your first post (you might in HN with another account). Plus this same article has been circulating a lot for a while from different usernames. What is the idea here, huh? Seems to me like y'all or just you, are just trying to defame DDG. If you don't use DDG, there are two meta paths that I know of: searx and metager. Metager is something I will never use ever again. searx is ok but the meta part is almost of no use: results are mostly google's or bing's, not some other-worldly search results. Plus, you don't get the features of DDG.

Thank you for your comments. I use DDG every day as my primary search engine on all devices. I saw the article on LinkedIn, found it to be interesting, and wondered if it had been posted to HN. I did a search for the URL and title on HN and there were no results.

This was here some two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31054646

Thank you for sharing the conversation. I didn’t see this thread.

Reads like: They talk to nazis, so they need to be nazis.

Gotta love ol' Dr. Roy. A guy who claims to be against FUD, yet does a lot to spread it.

I have stopped using DDG since they started censoring or down-ranking some sites. I'm not even remotely interested in the things they down-rank, but it bothers me that they betrayed me for my main reason for choosing DDG in first place.

What is the alternative people should be using then?

I've been using https://kagi.com/ for a few months. It's pretty good and solves the you're the product problem.

searx

Searx beats everything on a technical level.

What do you mean by "on a technical level"? Only asking because, well, I don't understand. Thanks!

It aggregates other search engines and the GUI is super clean.

Are results good?

is there any evidence of Amazon using Ring devices for surveilance?

lol roy...

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