zlacker

I didn't know DDG uses Bing's search index. What exactly is their value proposition over Bing then?

>>jakeva+(OP)
It's a search proxy service. You can use a VPN to mask your traffic's origin behind your VPN provider's IP, you can use DDG image search to mask your queries behind DDG.

>>jakeva+(OP)
I believe DDG does not track you.

>>jakeva+(OP)
No profiling.

> DuckDuckGo distinguishes itself from other search engines by not profiling its users and by showing all users the same search results for a given search term.

Also note that DDG doesn’t just rely on Bing.

> DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo

>>jakeva+(OP)
neither did I - not using DDG again. Back to Google :(

>>thih9+d2
Well either it uses only Bing for images, or it also censors. Because I sure wasn't able to find the picture on DDG.

So either way, as a user of DDG from day one - it's dead to me.

>>rllear+C8
I don't think going back to Google because DDG is not large enough to have its own fully independent index is really the right play. Given their reputation and usually lax attitude towards censoring, I'd say this akin to a supply chain attack, not active censoring.

>>thih9+d2
>showing all users the same search results for a given search term.

I'm definitely not seeing the same search results from DDG on my PC as on my phone (using different networks). So they do show different results based on something.

>>zwaps+8a
This is concerning.

>>Sebb76+th
Agreed, I bet as users of ddg we could press the team at duckduckgo to prioritize a fix for this failure mode of censorship.

Maybe they can somehow detect censorship real-time and have their own hot image cache for a certain sized corpus.

This is a fun problem for them to solve for us now that it's a failure mode they didn't fully appreciate until now. They are a search engine aggregator, they need another feed for internet images. This is an engineering problem to do cheaply centrally or distributed.

>>thih9+d2
Those other sources are mostly used for special results such as "Instant Answers".

DDG's main search results mostly come from Bing, as the source for that Wikipedia statement reveals:

https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/

> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).

Anyone can see this for themselves by comparing a number of Bing and DDG searches.

>>thih9+d2
"doesn't rely on bing" but actually mostly rely on bing, they want to create this illusion to hide this ugly fact.