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Comment by goalieca | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo famously does not save your search history but the way things are going I fear that one day such a thing will be mandated.

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DDG famously blocked people in countries that aren't China from searching for topics that China censors.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925

That was caused by Microsoft (DDG uses Bing search results):

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/04/microsoft...

Don't get me wrong, it doesn't make them look good, but the problem was the with the source of their results, not them censoring "tank man".

No thanks, I prefer a search engine that doesn't implement Chinese censorship when I'm not in China.

Did you mean to reply to someone else? Because as explained, DDG didn't implement any censorship.

If I use DDG outside of China, and its results are sanitized of anything that offends the CCP, I will hold DDG accountable for that. It doesn't matter if under the hood DDG sources search results from somewhere else, DDG is the one serving me censored results. DDG "implemented" censorship. DDG is accountable.

From my point of view, there's a difference between displaying censored results from a 3rd party and implementing censorship. In this case, Microsoft / Bing censored their results and everyone relying on their results passed the censored results along.

No doubt this is bad, but we know who did the censoring (Microsoft). DDG? I guess we can blame them for using a bad source and for not double checking stuff like this (if that's even possible/viable)?

Anyway, what to use instead? The main alt search engines usually use Bing (DDG, Qwant, Ecosia, Yahoo Search, etc). The only one I'm aware that uses a different source is Startpage (they use Google), but now they're owned by an ad tech company (why not stick with Google in that case?). There's also Brave Search (they have their own index, but also include results from Google and Bing if you want), but it's still in beta and I'm not sure if it's ready yet for prime time.

So... no Bing or Bing-powered search engines. What's left? Yandex? Maybe some Searx instance (which never worked that well for my needs)? Going back to Google?

If Google is the only search engine that doesn't implement Chinese censorship outside of China, then that sounds a lot better than alts that censor search results via Bing.

Excuse the self promotion but to answer your question there is Gigablast and Mojeek. https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/05/no-tracking-search-how-does-...

DuckDuckGo does save users search history. It is stated in their privacy policy:

"We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings. We use aggregate, non-personal search data to improve things like misspellings."

Startpage's privacy policy states they do not save search history:

"We don't record your search queries

When you search, your query is automatically stripped of unnecessary metadata including your IP address and other identifying information. We send the anonymized search query to Google and return the search results to you. We don’t log your searches.

To prevent abuse such as robotic high-volume querying, we anonymously determine the frequency of popular search keywords as a part of our anti-abuse measures, while protecting your privacy."

And ProtonMail never keeps (er, kept) IP logs.

You can trust them if you want, but really can you trust any company now days?

They were legally compelled to BEGIN keeping logs for a specific individual. It’s not that they had logs ready to go. They also notified the user that they had received the Swiss warrant.

What should they have done differently? It’s comply with the order or dissolve the company.

You were never able to trust companies.

History is likely saved by Bing. It's just that your address is not saved with it (assuming things are as DDG says, which I'm not sure how much I'd believe that). So net/net - just use Tor, and disable everything there is to disable as far as cookies and other methods of tracking.

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