Recent DuckDuckGo "scandal"

[freefrog]

Just found this, which is some days old already:
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/duckduck ... t-trackers

It's also talked about in many other websites, though not sure if they're only "copy-pasting" the same news...

Should I worry about this?

[back2themoon]

I assume you are using the Pale Moon browser. The story is about the DuckDuckGo browser, not the DuckDuckGo search engine (or Pale Moon). So no, you should not worry about it.

I suggest taking a look at the official reply here: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/com ... ssion_for/

[Moonraker]

I see nothing "scandalous" here and the owner of duckduckgo is being clear and transparent of the how and why of those microsoft trackers.

[athenian200]

Well, I always heard DuckDuckGo gets all their results from Bing anyway, so this doesn't really surprise me. There must be some kind of relationship there, the two dominant forces in search are Google and Bing... you don't survive as a viable search engine unless you can get results from at least one of them, and they are pretty openly opposed to association with Google, which really leaves only one option.

I guess on the bright side, I don't feel as bad about using Bing search out of years of habit and the lure of Amazon gift cards. It doesn't seem like much of a scandal really, they didn't exactly hide it. I think they stated this on their website officially?

[Mæstro]

the two dominant forces in search are Google and Bing... you don't survive as a viable search engine unless you can get results from at least one of them, and they are pretty openly opposed to association with Google, which really leaves only one option.

Native search engines, with their own indices, flourish in Czechia, Russia, Korea and China. Within the Anglo-Saxon world, Mojeek and Gigablast keep their own indices also. (Mojeek lets users choose whether to use Bing or Pixabay for images.)

[athenian200]

Native search engines, with their own indices, flourish in Czechia, Russia, Korea and China.

Those countries are pretty far outside the norm, though. I believe in Russia and China specifically, their governments see western companies as being backed by the CIA, and additionally their governments make demands on those western companies that would be so unpopular at home that they are discouraged from going after those markets too hard. Essentially, they are able to have a thriving local search market in those countries only because their governments keep the big international players out. It would be interesting if at some point the biggest competitor to Google wound up being an English-targeted version of Baidu or something, though. Sort of like how TikTok has become very popular for video, and AliExpress is starting to compete with Amazon for people who want to cut out the middleman and don't mind longer shipping times/worse return policies.

Within the Anglo-Saxon world, Mojeek and Gigablast keep their own indices also. (Mojeek lets users choose whether to use Bing or Pixabay for images.)

Those options are more interesting for sure. Thanks for telling me about them.

While alternative crawler-based search engines have always existed and will probably continue to exist in some form, the kind of results they can provide are by no means competitive with the big two... they simply wouldn't have the resources to crawl the web in the same way, and therefore their indexes would likely be less complete. However, censorship may wind up changing the equation at some point, such that the alternative search engines will be crawling some websites that the major engines won't touch, so it's good to be aware of the alternatives.

[Moonchild]

Mojeek will be added as a default selectable option in Pale Moon 31.1 (the search will be integrated in the list of defaults that come with the browser), exactly to have an independently-indexed alternative for our users.

[Pentium4User]

Mojeek will be added as a default selectable option in Pale Moon 31.1 (the search will be integrated in the list of defaults that come with the browser), exactly to have an independently-indexed alternative for our users.

Thx for that.
Is there also a plan to switch the default search engine?
I made good experience with searx.be, no censorship, good results, but they use other search engines for their results.

[Moonchild]

Is there also a plan to switch the default search engine?

No. Especially not towards an aggragator that will not improve search quality and will still depend on search result from mainstream search providers that will bias and/or censor results. In addition, DDG supports the project in a major way, as you know.

[mr tribute]

It would be nice to have Brave Search added. It's still in beta so can be among optional search engines here:
https://addons.palemoon.org/search-plugins/

Independent search
Even supposedly “neutral” or “private” search engines rely on big tech for results. Brave is different. We deliver results based on our own built-from-scratch index. We’re beholden to no one.

https://brave.com/search/

Brave search page renders without the cog in the upper right corner in Pale Moon
https://search.brave.com/

[FranklinDM]

Brave search page renders without the cog in the upper right corner in Pale Moon

It uses nullish coalescing (??), but that shouldn't be a problem anymore with the next release of Pale Moon (v31.1.0) which includes support for this.

[Blacklab]

It uses nullish coalescing (??), but that shouldn't be a problem anymore with the next release of Pale Moon (v31.1.0) which includes support for this.

I have absolutely no idea what 'nullish coalescing' might be... but thank you for your answer.
I'd not realised there was a Brave 'Search Settings' cogwheel button gone AWOL from top RH corner of Brave Search's home page!

Brave Search homepage + settings cog (Firefox ESR).jpg

Brave Search homepage + Settings open (Firefox ESR).jpg

[Moonchild]

I have absolutely no idea what 'nullish coalescing' might be... but thank you for your answer.

A nullish coalescing operator is a new addition to the Javascript specification that makes a specific comparison to assign a result to a variable.

The nullish coalescing operator (??) is a logical operator that returns its right-hand side operand when its left-hand side operand is null or undefined, and otherwise returns its left-hand side operand.

This can be seen as a special case of the logical OR (||) operator, which returns the right-hand side operand if the left operand is any falsy value, not only null or undefined. In other words, if you use || to provide some default value to another variable foo, you may encounter unexpected behaviors if you consider some falsy values as usable (e.g., '' or 0).

So, it is a way to work around the long-established paradigm in JavaScript that "0" and empty strings in logic comparisons are considered "false" values, for the cases where you actually want 0 or an empty string as a valid result. It's common in programming that 0 = false and 1 = true, and an empty string = null = false (e.g. it's common to check for the existence of something in an if() statment by just making the conditional the variable to check - if empty or null or not defined, that's false and the if statement skips the code block).
IMHO it's a solution to a problem that didn't exist before (i.e. sticking to the rule that you shouldn't just use any value in logical comparisons and relying on the engine to make a sane cast to a boolean value). Using a logical or as a way to provide a default value is fairly common (lazy) shorthand for assigning a default value first, then assigning it with a new value if it exists, but obviously doesn't always work. So now because of the convenience factor trumping everything, engines have to cater specifically to this case, instead. Of course the same people causing the problem will be instantly always using '??' now as a result, since it's the "safer alternative" with the same amount of keystrokes, even if they didn't actually need it in the first place, nor necessarily need it now instead of an actual logical or, hence the rising popularity of its use.

More details on MDN.

[Eduardo Lucas]

Native search engines, with their own indices, flourish in Czechia, Russia, Korea and China.

Those countries are pretty far outside the norm, though. I believe in Russia and China specifically, their governments see western companies as being backed by the CIA, and additionally their governments make demands on those western companies that would be so unpopular at home that they are discouraged from going after those markets too hard. Essentially, they are able to have a thriving local search market in those countries only because their governments keep the big international players out. It would be interesting if at some point the biggest competitor to Google wound up being an English-targeted version of Baidu or something, though.

Yandex.eu is something like that from yandex but much less powerful than baidu and does not fit your (and my) desire, indigenously developed and financially backed by a russian company. I use it as default + mojeek and ddg as alternatives, only leaving google for maps which is still very powerful in my region

[mr tribute]

Brave search page renders without the cog in the upper right corner in Pale Moon

It uses nullish coalescing (??), but that shouldn't be a problem anymore with the next release of Pale Moon (v31.1.0) which includes support for this.

Sounds good!