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It remains strange to me how much "Big Money" has been able to "commoditize" what should be the most unrestricted thing on this planet: "The World-Wide Web." Yet, they have managed to do so ... perhaps, "until now."
For instance, "Twitter" commercialized "IRC = Internet Relay Chat," even initially copying a thoroughly-arbitrary message size limit that (I happen to know ...) originated from the peculiarities of the IBM-3270 mainframe terminal when running under VM/SP. "Facebook" morphed itself from the "web-browser forums and chat rooms" that were beginning to develop.
(One of my colleagues and still-friends was the unsung individual who put the word, "Relay," into that acronym, while I administered the VM/SP system upon which he originally did it.)
Well, now, so confident have they become of their "market stranglehold" that they engage in censorship. And, so confident are they about "advertising = the only possible source of revenue" that they censor this, too.
As for me, I'm entirely ready for these "Big Tech" (sic ...) people to be forced to remember their technological roots. They have never, in fact, "had an exclusive," and, by the intrinsic nature of the Internet itself, they never will.
I welcome the success of DuckDuckGo, and use it daily, for exactly one reason: "because they provide me with a better answer."
Last edited by sundialsvcs; 01-05-2022 at 04:35 PM.
Wasn't there a controversy about who owns StartPage?
Yes, there was concern about the takeover of StartPage by System1, an internet advertising and consumer marketing company. This led the people then over at PrivacyTools (who have now moved to Privacy Guides) to remove StartPage from their recommended search engine providers list.
However, subsequently they were satisfied that System1's purchase of StartPage did not threaten the latter's operations as a privacy-focused search engine provider.
anyhow using duckduckgo is also non libre or non-free. The source code is not available.
Have you looked at more libre web search engines, hosted by some libre institutions, which means with opensource code and on the libre FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD servers or also GNU/Linux servers?
there is YaCy. We run YaCy on our servers, it is quite okay, but still. It has too much dependencies, and it does not search so well as duckduckgo.
I use duckduckgo as my default search engine. Even at work. Bing and Google are two I stay away from if all possible. DDG is simple to use -- if you can spell and type.
Bing works for voice search. Duckduck go doesn't offer that. (Google's only works with chrome).
If the voice audio processing is not being done locally on your device, or on a remote device you control, you are sending biometric information each time you use it. It may not be entirely clear if that biometric information is being stored and profiled, but I would err on the side of yes. It doesn't surprise me Duckduckgo doesn't offer it.
If the voice audio processing is not being done locally on your device, or on a remote device you control, you are sending biometric information each time you use it. It may not be entirely clear if that biometric information is being stored and profiled, but I would err on the side of yes. It doesn't surprise me Duckduckgo doesn't offer it.
Agreed. People sometimes forget that even if a company doesn't use harvested data for nefarious purposes, they probably do make them available to employees, contractors and crackers/script kiddies (because security is expensive) - and any one of those groups might include people with more time than ethics.
I switched to DDG a few years ago when Google's results and spelling suggestions seemed to be going downhill. Nowadays I give Google a chance if DDG can't find what I want, and it often comes through for technical information.
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