Heard some sketchy stuff about duckduckgo recently, found out about start page.many users?
The freakout over DuckDuckGo has been massively exaggerated. There's nothing invasive about the search, and there never has been.
There's proof they allowed Microsoft to use trackers though...I dig DDG as they were one of the first functional alternative search engines to Google with an emphasis on privacy, yet there are much better options today. I'm going to have to peep kagi based on this thread, but I'll need to be strongly convinced to switch from SearXNG.
You are thinking of a browser app, not the search engine. And by "allowing", you mean "did not add to the blacklist of things to block when using their browser". And they rectified this pretty quickly, so there's a not insubstantial chance it was just an accident.
Blacklists are going to be imperfect by definition, if uBlock Origin misses a tracker I'm not going to say it's "allowing" the site to track me
Being an accident would be news to me. Since it sources Bing for results, you'd think Microsofts trackers would be a focal point of their privacy approach. Sleeping on trackers known to be present isn't a good look either way.
Most search engines that claim to be private (StartPage, Qwant, etc) are fake and will try their hardest to sneakily profit from user data, with DuckDuckGo being the greatest example as they were caught selling user data to Microsoft, only stopping so when they were caught. The only search engine I would recommend is SearXNG. It's feature rich and is primarily ran by privacy enthusiasts.
Never heard of it, but something to check out for sure. I’ve been using Kagi and it reminds me just how far gone most search engines have become.
I used it for quite a while
I switched to kagi recently and never been happier
