this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
98 points (100.0% liked)
Free and Open Source Software
17926 readers
20 users here now
If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Where did you hear this? This isn't true. If you want google without the tracking, use StartPage (if you're using DDG this can be accessed with the !sp bang preface)
DDG uses Bing as their fallback engine but also does a lot of propitiatory indexing of its own
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
"propitiatory indexing" is a delightful autocorrect :)
I don't even think I've ever heard the word "propitiatory" used so TIL from my own error
Sorry, I must've mixed up Start Page and DDG and/or Google and Bing. Though wasn't aware that they did that much indexing of their own.
Yeah it seems way more smaller search engines use Bing than Google, I'm not sure why but I'm guessing either API costs or privacy agreements? DDG did get into hot water a couple of years ago over this because Bing was serving ads which were not private and were potentially profiling DDG users. No company is perfect all the time but they did promptly attempt to fix the issue. I do like them as far as tech firms go.