Sold their souls to the Bing Devil.

[GTP]

I'm astonished at how many supposedly "private" search engines that offer privacy to users have sold their souls to Bing.

DuckDuck Go, Qwant, StartPage and many others are now using Bing for their backends.

 

[nlinecomputers]

So? You either trust DuckDuckGo to filter out all of your PII and demographics or you don’t. None of these companies have the resources to run their own search engine so they have to leverage Bing and Google to do it. And they have to collect and provide to others some demographic data to someone in order to pay for their own operations.

 

[GTP]

So why offer "privacy" to end users?

 

[nlinecomputers]

So why offer "privacy" to end users?

Because the information they collect isn’t personally linked to you. They have to get something from you or it wouldn’t be possible to deliver the search results back to you. They also display ads based on what you just searched. You search for tires you get ads for, ya know, tires.

 

[GTP]

It seems we are just going to go round in circles with this so I'll just leave it here.

 

[phaZed]

I use SearX - run it in a Docker - Makes sure all queries are untraceable and aggregates over 70 engines if wanted.

 

[GTP]

I use SearX - run it in a Docker - Makes sure all queries are untraceable and aggregates over 70 engines if wanted.

I also use SearX. It returns great results and I've been happy with it.

 

[lcoughey]

I don't know how anyone can use bing these days. Their search results are horrible.

 

[nlinecomputers]

It seems we are just going to go round in circles with this so I'll just leave it here.

Like I said you either believe that DuckDuckGo filters you out or you don’t. When you search on DDG they perform the search on your behalf on Bing. Bing does not see YOU. Only DDG. They don’t know you asked for the search because they only see DDG. That’s the whole point.

 

[NviGate Systems]

If you don't pay for a product, YOU are the product.

Nothing is truly free. Not even beer. (I never got the slogan 'free as in beer'. Idiots. Beer ain't free. Somebody pays for it. )

Products can be sticky webs hoping you will leave something tasty behind, or launch pads for something far, far away you can't easily escape from if you ever want to get back home in one piece. They can also be double face. One side, charming, helpful. Side B, maniacal and insane but will flip back to Side A when caught and whistle while asking..."Hey neighbor mind if I borrow the chainsaw and shovel?"

You get what you pay for. If you didn't pay, you've opened a tab. Lucky you. Unlucky you that paying that tab will hurt from a little to allot.

 

[britechguy]

If you don't pay for a product, YOU are the product.

And when it comes to search engines, we've all "been products" for literally decades now. For some more so than others.

The old drinking phrase, "Pick your poison," springs immediately to mind.

 

[timeshifter]

It's worth pointing out that Google is an advertising company.

 

[nlinecomputers]

It's worth pointing out that Google is an advertising company.

So is every search engine.

 

[nlinecomputers]

And when it comes to search engines, we've all "been products" for literally decades now. For some more so than others.

The old drinking phrase, "Pick your poison," springs immediately to mind.

And frankly, that is often of more benefit than harm to us. Is your life really ruined because Google, Bing, and Amazon all know that you are shopping for a new cordless drill?

 

[britechguy]

Is your life really ruined because Google, Bing, and Amazon all know that you are shopping for a new cordless drill?

No, but oddly enough it does bother me more that Google or Bing know this than Amazon. Google and Bing are both search engines (and two I don't use, I hasten to add) and I don't like search engines building a dossier on me and using some really scary (yet accurate) technology to extrapolate things from what I have done/looked for to figure out others.

Amazon, by contrast, is a store. When I use an online store, it's both to my benefit and theirs to be able to know what I have ordered in the past to make it easy to reorder and to point me to other things I might like to purchase. I actually expect this behavior from any online store that I use.

But I use search engines, primarily DuckDuckGo, that do not track me or build dossiers on me based on my search history. I don't give a damn what search engine they may or may not hand off my search to and hand the results back to me if I am not identified and linked in any way to the underlying search engine that would create such a dossier. I never thought that DuckDuckGo, StartPage, etc., had reinvented the searching wheel, only that they gave me a level of complete removal from any data collection by others for whatever searching I did and were not collecting information themselves. That's the service they offer and the one I'm seeking.