Comment by danShumway
4 years ago
You're not supposed to totally trust DDG, but they are a better default search engine than Google if you care about privacy.
- they are less likely to throw a captcha in your face if you connect over VPN
- they have less surveillance infrastructure and run less code clientside than Google does
- they are at least not explicitly tracking you
- they have a lower number of secondary data-points from other services that can be connected to your searches
the list kind of goes on. I don't assume that DuckDuckGo is perfectly trustworthy just because they say so, but Debian has a choice of a couple of different default search engines that are mature enough and give good enough results to use as a default search tool: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc...
Of those choices, DuckDuckGo seems to be a pretty reasonable decision.
At the very least, DuckDuckGo lets me search when I'm behind a VPN and have anti-fingerprinting tools turned on, Google very often doesn't. It's not a super-hard decision for me which one is more private.
Maybe DDG is good replacement for English users, but I wonder does debian developers considered is it fine for global users.
Of course they do, when the alternative is Google.
Do you want to try and argue that Google is a more private search engine than DDG outside of the US?
privacy isn't the only one criterion to choose search engine. If search quality is very poor for a language, it's not suitable even if it's privacy oriented.
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