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DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

torrentfreak.com

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Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#471

Post by account42 »

seanw444 wrote: post #372
prmoustache wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being open source doesn't mean the people running the public searx instances aren't tracking you. Self-hosting makes you lose all the benefits of proxying. In the end be it ddg or searx you can only rely on some third-party trust.

Yup, you choose one or the other. As with all things, there's you can't have it all. There's a balance.

Still, it's a valid criticism. How is anyone supposed to know which of the numerous searx instances has what they want. Seems this would really benefit from an instance run by a transparent non-profit organization. You still need to trust someone, you always do, but that doesn't mean that that trust can't be earned rather than just assumed.

Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#472

Post by account42 »

calibas wrote: post #152
srvmshr wrote: post #39

Serious Question: How is the DDG search structured? Is it a cosmetic skin over Bing, or is it aggregating from other sites like Yahoo, ecosia etc additionally? If it is just Bing under the hood, how does it exist as business entity. I am sure MS will take some action to consolidate their search share rather than seeing splintered.

HN constantly mentions DDG is really just Bing in disguise and they're essentially the same. However, that can't be entirely true because they produce different results for the same search term. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=obscure+search+term&ia=web https://www4.bing.com/search?q=obscure+search+term That being said, when Bing censored "tank man", DDG's image search also produced 0 results for "tank man".

Between geotargeting and A/B testing and possible differences between the Bing API and public website you really can't conclude that DDG is not just what they get from Bing based on one example.

Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#473

Post by account42 »

canyoudobetter wrote: post #272

DuckDuckGo has a cheat sheet specifically for youtube-dl so it seems quite unlikely they are actively trying to suppress content about youtube-dl: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=youtubedl%20cheat%20sheet&ia=cheat... There’s a lot of hate in this thread towards a company trying to do the right thing.

> https://duckduckgo.com/?q=youtubedl%20cheat%20sheet&ia=cheat...

"This Instant Answer was made by the DuckDuckHack Community."

> There’s a lot of hate in this thread

You would do yourself a favor if you tried to engage with criticism instead of deriding it as hate. If you think something is wrong you should be able to come up with convincing counter-arguments.

> towards a company trying to do the right thing.

A company that claims they are trying to do the right thing.

Re: DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

#474

Post by srg0 »

freediver wrote: post #413
srg0 wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is kagi more private? It requires an account to use, and it’s going to be a paid service. So it always has a strong user ID associated with every query. Whether it is not stored and not processed cannot be verified. It’s the same story about trust.

(Kagi dev here) Being a paid service means Kagi's incentives are different. Instead of selling your data or profiting from feeding into ad-tech food chain, we are interested in selling you a subscription. We do not associate queries with an account, as a matter of fact we do not save queries at all. You are right that this can not be verified, the question you need to ask yourself is what kind of incentive we have fo…

Personally I find that you did a great job with Kagi. I agree that the incentives are important, and I hope that Kagi will be successful and may prove that a different business model is possible. I'm also inclined to trust Kagi, but that's just that, trust and not much to lose.
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