Has there ever been any effort to create an open source search engine that is entirely transparent in both its software and practices? (dmoz.org doesn't count!)
-- Daniel Sieradski d...@danielsieradski.com http://danielsieradski.com 315.889.1444 Follow me at http://twitter.com/selfagency Public key http://danielsieradski.com/share/ds_public.key On Jun 24, 2013, at 8:20 PM, Mike Perry <mikepe...@torproject.org> wrote: > 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 > -- > Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by > emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at > https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
