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Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Privacy and ads/spam are different things.

DDG has ads based on your search query, that's how they make money. The difference is that they don't profile you, at least that's what they say. You can spam and respect people privacy, just by not looking who you are spamming.

And yes, "privacy" is a marketing ploy for anyone who is not Google. As for general purpose search engines, there are only two: Google and Bing, most others (including DDG) are just a front for Bing. There are other, more specialized crawlers including Marginalia whose author often posts on HN, and there is Yandex for Russia and Baidu for China, but the general idea is that if it is not Google, it is Bing.

"At least that's what they say" is exactly what is at issue. You offer no reason to believe what they say.

I can find no actual evidence that DDG is run by spammers. This does not strike me as credible.

I can find no evidence that DDG is not run by spammers. Any claim that it is not is clearly what would demand solid evidence.

That's not how the burden of proof works here.

The extraordinary claim here is the one DDG is making. They have every incentive to lie about it. There is no obvious way to check their claim.

Regardless of whether you are right or wrong about DDG:

Doesn't this line of logic lead to every free site being evil, including the one we're talking on?

It would actually help if you would link to that HN posting so others can verify.

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