Searx – A privacy-respecting, hackable metasearch engine

Re:Searx – A privacy-respecting, hackable metasearch engine by adrusi on Monday July 25, 2016 @11:07AM (#12159165)

You can't know if a public installation of an open source project is actually just running the code that you see either. Hosted open source projects have no security benefits over proprietary services.

And duckduckgo is not owned by yahoo. It has partnerships with yahoo, bing and yandex to use their search databases.

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Re:Searx – A privacy-respecting, hackable metasearch engine by epchong on Monday July 25, 2016 @11:14AM (#12159221)

I agree with you. However, you can run your own instance of searx if you don't trust anyone. In case of DDG you don't have this option.

I am not sure that partnership or ownership really changes anything. But I hope I am wrong about it. :)

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Re:Searx – A privacy-respecting, hackable metasearch engine by mintplant on Monday July 25, 2016 @04:04PM (#12161210)

> I am not sure that partnership or ownership really changes anything.

It changes everything. DDG is a Yahoo customer and, as adrusi wrote, sources search data from them among other providers. Yahoo doesn't control DDG, its privacy measures, data collection, or product direction as they would as a parent company. The relationship is completely different.

I do agree with you about Searx having the optional self-hosting advantage. DDG claim they won't track you, but there's really no way to be certain.

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