How Do I Find Broken Links? – Questions For Corbett #075

We can do better than DuckDuckGo – by Drew DeVault

DuckDuckGo is one of the long-time darlings of the technophile’s pro-privacy recommendations, and in fact the search engine that I use myself on the daily. They certainly present a more compelling option than many of the incumbents, like Google or Bing. Even so, DuckDuckGo is not good enough, and we ought to do better.

I have three grievances with DuckDuckGo:

1. It’s not open source. Almost all of DDG’s software is proprietary, and they’ve demonstrated gross incompetence in privacy in what little software they have made open source. Who knows what else is going on in the proprietary code?

2. DuckDuckGo is not a search engine. It’s more aptly described as a search engine frontend. They do handle features like bangs and instant answers internally, but their actual search results come from third-parties like Bing. They don’t operate a crawler for their search results, and are not independent.

3. The search results suck! The authoritative sources for anything I want to find are almost always buried beneath 2-5 results from content scrapers and blogspam. This is also true of other search engines like Google. Search engines are highly vulnerable to abuse and they aren’t doing enough to address it.

There are some FOSS attempts to do better here, but they all fall flat. searX is also a false search engine — that is, they serve someone else’s results. YaCy has their own crawler, but the distributed design makes results untolerably slow, poor quality, and vulnerable to abuse, and it’s missing strong central project leadership.

We need a real, working FOSS search engine, complete with its own crawler.

https://drewdevault.com/2020/11/17/Better-than-DuckDuckGo.html

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