Nadim Kobeissi: > I'd just like to add that I'm a DuckDuckGo user myself and that I can > definitely vouch for the service.
I've had a number of people tell me that they vouch for DuckDuckGo. What does this even mean? Nobody seems to be capable of rationally explaining it. Have you inspected their datacenter/server security? Have you audited their logging mechanisms? Does DuckDuckGo even have an https channel to Bing on the back end? Note that I don't vouch for StartPage. I merely think that StartPage provides superior search results to DDG. In fact, I wish both companies the best of luck business-wise, and I'm happy to have both of them at the two top positions in TBB's omnibox. This is because right now, there are only two ways to get https web search results over Tor. Microsoft allows Tor, but has officially refused to support https directly for Bing. Google regularly bans Tor nodes entirely, often without the possibility of even entering a Captcha or using a valid Gmail account (both of which are non-starters for a default engine of course, but would be better than status quo). Every time Tor tries to start a conversation with either Google or Microsoft on these two topics, they both give us a litany of excuses as to why fixing the situation is a "hard problem", even after we present potential cost-effective engineering solutions to both problems. For this reason, the loss of either DDG or Startpage would scare the shit out of me, but right now, neither one has done enough for Tor to warrant the default search position**, and since StartPage tends to index more of the deep web faster, it is my opinion we should stick with them as the top position, and have DDG in second. ** Sure, DuckDuckGo runs a hidden service, and also one of the slowest Tor relays on the network (rate limited to 50KB/sec or less), but it is quite debatable as to if either of these things are actually helpful to Tor. In fact, such a slow Tor relay probably harms Tor performance more than helps (in the rare event that you actually happen to select it). -- Mike Perry
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