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Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

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Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#51

Post by aendruk »

brnt wrote: post #37
bla3 wrote: post #13

DDG is for-profit and serves for the most part Bing results. Why not pick something truly open, like search.marginalia.nu?

A Debian (or FSF, or ...) hosted SearX instance would indeed be interesting and perhaps most Free.

risiOS hosts a searx instance for its users and configures it as the default search engine.

I worry about the sustainability of such a service though. Don’t they inevitably get blocked upstream?

It might work better for more local organizations to host such projects. I’ve always liked the idea of community centers and churches and whatnot hosting shared services for their community.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#52

Post by kornhole »

xuhu wrote: post #8

Is it common for distros to have deals with search providers in exchange for keeping them as the default in their browsers ?

I don't know, but that seems like a reasonable funding solution given that Google is expected to pay Apple ~$20B this year: https://dazeinfo.com/2022/01/05/google-pays-apple-for-not-la...

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#55

Post by ncmncm »

There was a posting on HN not long ago warning that DDG was run by spammers, and that the "privacy" focus is purely a marketing ploy.

This should be predictable on the basis that it is a free service, making you the product, and somebody else, therefore, the customer.

It is hard to know what else one can do to get useful search functionality. It has been a long time since Google dropped any emphasis on usefulness. Any useful results seem purely luck nowadays. You cannot even buy a subscription to "useful" from them or from, AFAIHF, anybody else.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#56

Post by bastardoperator »

jonas-w wrote: post #16

Best approach i think is, they way "ungoogled-chromium" does it. They don't enforce organization policies, but they set the default config to "no search" and then leave it up to the user to change it.

^This, let the user choose. If you can run Debian you can change your default search engine.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#59

Post by blamazon »

TLLtchvL8KZ wrote: post #54

Didn't DDG recently have some controversy about censoring things they didn't like related to Russia or Russian sites/news? I don't have links stored in history but it was fairly recent, it was their CEO on twitter I believe and they got a LOT of backlash.

> "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation. In addition to down-ranking sites associated with disinformation, we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) to highlight quality information for rapidly unfolding topics."

https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#60

Post by nightpool »

yunohn wrote: post #40
candiddevmike wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a Chromium bug, not a Debian bug--it's an insidious way to keep Google search as the default.

Preconfigured profiles are the right way to solve this, it’s just that the message could be worded more kindly.

No, preconfigured profiles are not the right way to solve this, as the message clearly indicates, pre-configured profiles are designed to be managed by the owner of the computer, not the software distributor. The right way to solve this would be to change the built-in default that applies before any profile is processed. This also would allow any other profile to override it if they wanted.

EDIT: Apparently the Debian team agrees: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=956012#72

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