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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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Every search engine will use your location. Especially when you make location based searches.
Do you think “restaurants in my area” should mean Earth? Or would you include the ISS also?
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You use the word “harvest”. Which has a meaning along the lines of: Collect and save for later use. That’s not necessarily the case in your example though. Nothing needs to be collected or saved. It only needs the one IP, the one time that search is done, then it can be (and on most of your “tested” engines is) forgotten.
If you search for “restaurants in Edmonton”, you’ll likely receive exactly what you think.
If you search for “anarcho-communism” or something equally non-related to location. Than the IP won’t matter, beyond giving you results in your local language.
A truly blind search, would generally suck. You’d need nearly half a dozen qualifiers to find some relevancy.
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Ideally it should also include the restaurant at the end of the universe
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Any website you connect have access to your public IP for each request, hence location recommendations
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How is that place still in business
A place like that relies on repeat customers
That’s just a test though, to see if the search engine is using some form of tracking. If they searched for something like “news” or “hot milfs” they don’t want “hot milfs in your area”.
That isn’t tracking. That’s just using the IP the search came from to specify “my area”.
No one said it was tracking. Is using location as a search term without it being asked for. What OP is looking for is a search engine that would return different results for “restaurants” and “restaurants near [location]”
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No search engine can be neutral, for the same reason that no news can be neutral.
People must decide what it will show you and if an algorithm decides, people must program the algorithm. All people are biased in some way.
True, but there is no requirement for a search engine to use such an algorithm to net results. I know this because I’ve been using search engines since the Windows 95 era. It’s possible to have what I seek. I’m just starting to question if anyone makes it.
I’m going to try the .onion version of DuckDuckGo later and see how that goes.
Update: This is … extremely odd. Simplified explanation: Tor connects you via a specific circuit of nodes, which you can see by clicking an icon next to the address bar. The last node it connects to is the exit node. But here’s the thing: Even the Tor edition of DDG insists on providing location-biased results that match the location of the exit node. I tested this by running a search on DDG and then connecting via a different circuit several times. Each time, the results were tailored to the location of the exit node. This is very disappointing. I’m going to do some searching and try some different search engines, but I think it’s safe to say I will not find what I’m looking for in any fork of DuckDuckGo, not even the .onion version.
Update 2: Ooops, I was using the clearnet version. I switched to the .onion version, which it turns out has to be done manually. I’m still getting very different results based on the exit node, although it’s much less obvious now. I’m thinking there might be some other .onion search engine that does what I need.