DuckDuckGo Showing Privacy-Invading Results

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So a few minutes ago, I searched "accursed farm" on DuckDuckGo as it was on my list of website to look into.

That being said, something strange happened. Through the search result, the wikipedia page for the town I currently live in popped up in the result.

I tried again and while the wikipedia page from earlier did not showed up, a page about on the town I live in did showed up.

I obviously can't post any pic as to not doxx myself, but I wonder if the same thing happens with you guys?

Edit: This seems to only happens when you click "more results". For the record I have Firefox and Ublock origin.
 

EzzyCrafts

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DuckDuckGo is quite literally a search engine option on Google's Chromebooks. DuckDuckGo is a prime honeypot funded by Google and by using it you aren't privat in any way shape or form. Use swisscows instead: it's faster, supports older browsers, and actually protects your privacy as far as I know. Certainly better than DDG.

You should've switched when the creator talked about "censoring misinformation" back a few months ago

 
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Collision

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All it takes to guess your location is an IP address. This is public information that you have to provide so that internet services can communicate with you. It should be obvious that DuckDuckGo (and almost every other internet service) collects this information. They even provide a little toggle at the top of their search page for setting your location. When I search for "accursed farm" I mostly get results related to the keywords but I do also get results for the word "farm" in the general area of my IP address. If you find this information to be an invasion of your privacy then I suggest you log off immediately.
 
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manpaint

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DuckDuckGo is quite literally a search engine option on Google's Chromebooks. DuckDuckGo is a prime honeypot funded by Google and by using it you aren't privat in any way shape or form. Use swisscows instead: it's faster, supports older browsers, and actually protects your privacy as far as I know. Certainly better than DDG.

You should've switched when the creator talked about "censoring misinformation" back a few months ago


Truth to be told, I had my doubts regarding DDG, but this definitively put the nail in the coffin for me. Thanks for the reccomendation.

All it takes to guess your location is an IP address. This is public information that you have to provide so that internet services can communicate with you. It should be obvious that DuckDuckGo (and almost every other internet service) collects this information. They even provide a little toggle at the top of their search page for setting your location. When I search for "accursed farm" I mostly get results related to the keywords but I do also get results for the word "farm" in the general area of my IP address. If you find this information to be an invasion of your privacy then I suggest you log off immediately.

I knew that it was at least temporarily storing my IP adress because that's just how the internet works. That being said I did not expect it to actually look up my location, let alone put it in the search query. I was also under the impression that Ublock origin could negate this kind of thing but I guess not.
 

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Since switching to a paid search engine i'd never use a free one again. Nice to know I'm not the product.

Which search engine do you use?
 

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DuckDuckGo is quite literally a search engine option on Google's Chromebooks. DuckDuckGo is a prime honeypot funded by Google and by using it you aren't privat in any way shape or form. Use swisscows instead: it's faster, supports older browsers, and actually protects your privacy as far as I know. Certainly better than DDG.

You should've switched when the creator talked about "censoring misinformation" back a few months ago


Swisscow looks good on the surface, but I did some digging and apparently it's not all that flowery:


All of this is according to their privacy policy only. However, we know better than to believe a privacy policy blindly - especially when there are some problems with the trustworthiness of Swisscows. First of all, they require JavaScript to display the page at all - which is a terrible design; worse yet - the code is heavily obfuscated - almost as if they were hiding something. I got a report of Swisscows including redirect links in its results. At first I thought it's some mistake, but decided to investigate and confirmed it. They look like this:


So they will perform targeted surveillance without notifying you when the government comes knocking (that's the great Swiss Privacy Law in action). The search engine also has this "family-friendly" shtick, which means you might get a message such as:


Dear user, the entered word is not allowed for under 18 year olds, since we have decided on the protection of minors, the word "insert search term" is excluded from the search. Thank you very much for your understanding!

I am starting to think that maybe we should go back to link directories instead.
 

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All it takes to guess your location is an IP address. This is public information that you have to provide so that internet services can communicate with you. It should be obvious that DuckDuckGo (and almost every other internet service) collects this information.
As usual, Collision coming in with a level head and factual info.

I am starting to think that maybe we should go back to link directories instead.
I have wondered before if/when people will start making websites in some sort of middle ground where they're not indexed by search engines, but also easily accessible to people who aren't tech savvy as long as they have the link. Basically something between current clear net and dark web. It would be a lot easier to keep a community niche that way without also requiring people to do more than they want or are comfortable with doing.
 
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Searx. Tl;dr searx is a meta search engine which forwards your queries to other search engines and then shows the results. The best option in my opinion is hosting and publishing your own instance, ofc that might be not possible so you can use some of the existing instances. That way you don't have to worry about ip/geolocation, if you trust that the owner of the instance doesen't log ips. If you don't trust the owner you can use multiple instances to mitigate the damage.
 

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I have wondered before if/when people will start making websites in some sort of middle ground where they're not indexed by search engines, but also easily accessible to people who aren't tech savvy as long as they have the link. Basically something between current clear net and dark web. It would be a lot easier to keep a community niche that way without also requiring people to do more than they want or are comfortable with doing.
While I think it's technically indexed by search engine, I think the whole indie web scene (Agora Road, Neocities, Yesterweb etc) is the closest thing to what you describe as it buried by more mainstream stuff.

If all major search engines were to nuke aforementionned sites tomorrow I think most of us would take a while to notice. What's nice about the Indie Web is that link directories and web ring are now a thing again.

Ever since I discovered that Neocities was a thing, I did not looked up any indie web related site on search engines. All I did was follow the rabbit hole of links - which I am all logging into a local text file. I personally found out about Agora on a https://a-website-is-a-room.net/.

So yeah, I definitively think that there should some kind of directory like, but for the rest of the web.

Searx. Tl;dr searx is a meta search engine which forwards your queries to other search engines and then shows the results. The best option in my opinion is hosting and publishing your own instance, ofc that might be not possible so you can use some of the existing instances. That way you don't have to worry about ip/geolocation, if you trust that the owner of the instance doesen't log ips. If you don't trust the owner you can use multiple instances to mitigate the damage.

According to https://digdeeper.club/articles/search.xhtml#searx it does seems somewhat decent although somewhat limited.
 

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All it takes to guess your location is an IP address. This is public information that you have to provide so that internet services can communicate with you. It should be obvious that DuckDuckGo (and almost every other internet service) collects this information. They even provide a little toggle at the top of their search page for setting your location. When I search for "accursed farm" I mostly get results related to the keywords but I do also get results for the word "farm" in the general area of my IP address. If you find this information to be an invasion of your privacy then I suggest you log off immediately.
I misread the OP post as duckduckgo popping up with a town he had lived in prior on his second search, this legitimately freaked me out and I was about to give you shit for not addressing that. Only to realize it said no such thing in the OP after I reread it.
 
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handoferis

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Actually looks pretty good. How long have you been using it?
since the middle of June, which to my shock was not long after the public beta launched. fave things about it are that you can push all listicle-type articles into a section and get them out of your main search results, and also blacklist or uprate certain domains
 
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shinobu

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It all started around 2012, when I noticed that the internet was simultaneously too big to crawl but also quickly centralizing into a few websites. From this insight I started my plan: first, develop a benign virus that spreads through exposed database exploits to enter NATs straight into AWS and Azure datacenters. Then I developed a small unobstrusive distributed web crawler, and spread it to my botnet. They returned their results to an AWS VM that I rented, along with Backblaze to store the sites into an index. Then I bought a few terabytes of storage and a server-class 4-CPU motherboard with plenty of room to upgrade. When I mirrored the index locally I wiped the VM and deleted the crawler from every machine in the botnet with a kill-switch. All of this was doing through seven layers of VPNs to make it nigh impossible to track me down by checking logs. At this point it was 2017, and I was ready to train a neutral network to distinguish the crap from the real websites. Then I wrote a custom search algorithm from state-of-the-art applied CS papers, stopping in the middle to discover a novel breakthrough technique that takes advantage of > 128 threads distributed across 4 CPUs without losing performance due to process migration (the secret is to write a new scheduler for Linux that extends process affinity for this usecase, then recompile the kernel and recompile the search program with my own fork of GCC to emit custom syscalls to modify this be inter-CPU affinity value dynamically according to workload). Finally I can search the web without falling into the data collection panpticon.


Anyway, my point is it was easy, right? Everyone should do this, guys. It'll make your search experience better
 
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since the middle of June, which to my shock was not long after the public beta launched. fave things about it are that you can push all listicle-type articles into a section and get them out of your main search results, and also blacklist or uprate certain domains
That sounds actually great, I liked that you can filter out shopping results and whatnot with the lenses. I might have to try it
 
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