Lukol – A “Privacy” Search Engine | Hacker News Reader

Lukol – A “Privacy” Search Engine

thenewleafjournal.com

28 pointsmemorable11 comments

> So this anonymous search engine stores cookies on your computer to serve you with personalized “content and ads” and it shares information about your use of the site with “advertising and analytics partners.” It then directs you to Google’s privacy policy page for information about how to opt out of Google cookies. While I struggle to see how Lukol is privacy-friendly (much less anonymous), it is a great example for why it is important to look behind catchy promises about privacy and anonymity.

It would be funny, in an ironic way, if it didn't undermine users so badly.

Article author response: I had a feeling as soon as I clicked onto the homepage that something was off. To their credit, the link to the privacy policy is on the homepage. Counter-point, the link text is "Lukol Protects Your Privacy."

> the link text is "Lukol Protects Your Privacy."

Well that's the standard phrase today if you want to avoid telling people you don't give a damn.

Like when cookie banners start with "your privacy is important to us", followed by a list of 50 services that'll receive your user data from that site. Though my favorite is the "our european visitors are important to us" banner for blocked EU users as it implies all other users are not important to the website owners due to a lack of comparable privacy laws.

Hilarious and sad at the same time.

I think it's just trying to make fun of privacy focused online services.

Can't vouch for Lukol, but I have been using Searx and really enjoy it. You can self host or use a public instance.

https://searx.github.io/searx/

Or the fork which is much more active these days https://docs.searxng.org/

In the past it Lukol served Google Ads: https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io/issues/1557#...

Searx is great. Every time searx results are bad to inexistent I compare with Google, and results are as bad to inexistent. This is in stark contrast to one year doing the same with DDG where !g was often the key to good results. Ony thing is, because public instances tend to face some rate limiting about once a week, so everytime I type a long query I "CTRL A > CTRL C" it to make sure I don't lose it.

kagi.com is the best of the new searches that I've tried. My only reservation is that the planned cost when they start charging is more than I want to spend, but in the meantime, I'm really enjoying the search. It's the first non-google search engine where I'm not using !g or equivalent 20% of the time.

Bullshit, a technical term [1], is not falsehood, but words used with complete and utter disregard as to whether they are true or false. Corporate bullshit is the instrumental use of such words to "make the right noises" and create some semblance of solidity from the gaseous evacuations of "executive" types. That includes corporate mottos, mission statements, and product descriptions, and to a large extent privacy policies, ethics statements and corporate responsibility pledges.

All fun and games.

The only downside is that our tolerance for such mischief has rendered any sincere communication void. Nobody with a business that actually wants to trade on these values has a chance.

Perhaps that is the point of this semantic spam, to discombobulate and jam the value perceptions of the public so much that they are unable to differentiate anything genuine from the tide spewed by the shit-pedlars.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

If a search engine needs cookies to operate, its neither private nor something for me.

A tricky problem all search engines face, regardless of scale and popularity, is dealing with bot spam, of which there is a lot [1].

It's not uncommon to face quarter of a million bot-searches per day and it's really difficult to actually combat since they're on a botnet, without some sort of privacy invasion, either via cookies or something like cloudflare.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31395231 (I can attest to this pattern as well through my search engine)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com