I agree that web searches are necessary. I propose this as a solution. Google and DDG both contribute to the open-source community (not necessarily the FOSS community) with money and developers, so we shouldn't prefer one over the other. I propose that we should make no search engine the "default." Rather, we should do something like Google Chrome does when it starts up and ask the user what search engine they want to use. Optionally, we could include links to information about the various search engines. This way, Trisquel is not seen as being preferential (the search engine listings would be in randomized order) and the community has new search options.
As for a FOSS search engine, I don't know of any FOSS internet search engines; the closest thing to it would be htdig. On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 6:17 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Hmm, I don't know. I'm pretty sure our default search engine right now is > Google. While I don't have any data to back this up, I imagine the software > behind DuckDuckGo is "freer" than that behind the Google search engine. > > On the other hand, Trisquel is a fully free operating system. You're > completely right in saying that we shouldn't be recommending the use of > non-free software, even if it is a web service like it is in this case. > > But on the other other hand (that's three hands, now), people need to do > web searches. It's one of the primary things people do on the web. Is > there actually a fully free search engine out there? I'd like to hear about > it if there is. > > Then again, Google is synonymous with web searching to many people. > Providing them with something like DuckDuckGo, which they've probably never > heard of, could be confusing and off-putting. > > Like I said, I don't know. This certainly is a tricky situation. >
