![]() ![]() Note that in this post I deliberately ignore the privacy practices contained in these search providers’ other products. It will be interesting to see how this one matures as well, and whether or not it will continue to be Tor-friendly. I don’t think their search results are as good as the larger providers, especially for regional content, but this may change. They claim to not store IP addresses (but they do process it in some way) or user agents. They rely on their own web crawling for all search results. ![]() Considering that the feature is opt-in, and again assuming that their engine builds on this usage data, I am surprised at how good search results their engine provides me with.Īnother up-and-coming search provider I deem interesting is yep.com. I have not found clear information on how this crawling is conducted, but it seems that they use usage data from Brave Browser users. They state that a large majority of search results result from their own crawling, from something they call the Web Discovery Project. But I am interested in knowing more about their independent web crawling methods. I assume (but can’t confirm) that DuckDuckGo works the same way.Īs for Brave Search, I don’t want to judge it straight away as it’s still a rather new search engine. They also transmit search queries to their “partners” (including Bing), presumably to be able to extract and display the search results. They will also read your user agent, but it’s not clear whether this gets linked to your IP address. Metager notes in their privacy policy that IP addresses and timestamps of searches are stored for 96 hours, then presumably deleted. So any personal information entered into that search box is saved.Īs to tracking your ad clicks, I cannot remember the last time I saw an ad on DuckDuckGo, so I cannot myself evaluate how they look and behave. Note that DuckDuckGo does store search queries. But even if they do, Tor Browser should protect you against this (what can be extracted is the IP address of the exit node and the generic user agent shared by thousands of other Tor Browser users). According to their privacy policy ( DuckDuckGo Privacy) they don’t store your IP or browser user agent. The Brave web browser now has over 32 million monthly active users, up from 25 million last March.Not full of trackers and things that can be used to fingerprint a browsing session.ĭuckDuckGo is not full of trackers, but they use their own in-house analytics. And there are some interesting promises for the future: Brave Search will offer ad-free paid search and ad-supported search options and will be available for developers who wish to create third-party search solutions.īrave Search is currently in beta in Brave browsers across desktop and mobile, and it will become the default search in the Brave browser later this year, the company says. There are no algorithms to bias the results, as is the case with Google (and most likely Bing), and thus no censorship. To that end, Brave Search is built “on top of a completely independent index,” and is based on the technology it acquired with Tailcat this past March. So while Brave’s focus on privacy-similar to that of DuckDuckGo-is certainly laudable, this service will never take off with users if they can’t get the results they need. Of course, the problem with non-Google search engines, be they big businesses like Microsoft Bing or tiny startups like DuckDuckGo, is that they do not provide the same level of quality as does the market leader. And regulators all around the world have taken notice, with many launching investigations and formal charges against the company. ![]() The timing of this is both interesting and non-coincidental: Google Search is ubiquitous and has no serious rivals, but the tech giant has come under increased scrutiny in recent years for its rampant tracking and privacy violations. ![]()
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