Of course, they’re not a member anymore

It’s Eternity now but yes it is

It does that, too, yes. But as I mentioned above it in fact does have its own web crawler and search algorithm, just like other search engines. It combines the results which makes DDG technically a true search engine, even though it improves its results by utilizing other search enignes, too. Shall we agree to this?

Hang on, I’m really trying to understand.

According to Wikpedia,

A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing.

DDG operates a crawler just like that which is a characteristic of a search engine.

A search engine is defined by Webster as

computer software used to search data (such as text or a database) for specified information also : a site on the World Wide Web that uses such software to locate key words in other sites

Which is what DDG is and does. How is DDG not a search engine?

DuckDuckGo’s results are a compilation of “over 400” sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the search results.

(Wikipedia)

And Firefox is not a browser?

And the browser extension is great

Murena has a pretty nice online ecosystem with Nextcloud and OnlyOffice for those who don’t want or know how to self-host

No worries. Not the target audience.

If you have Netflix you can check out “The Great Hack”. It’s about Cambridge Analytica and their role in elections. Companies can use your data to change you. Your opinions, who you vote for, what you buy. A lot of stuff.

Totally! While you’re at it: Make sure to use WeChat and TikTok. Oh, also: Hoyoverse makes great games. They require admin perms but you wouldn’t worry about that.

no, but seriously

I use LibreWolf as a browser and Qwant, Startpage, SearX (murena spot) and SwissCows as search engines.

All of these respect my privacy. Yandex doesn’t.

Also:

I just went to Yandex.com. It immediately told me information about my “location” (I fake it). That’s kind of unsettling because I never gave that info or asked for anything related to me or my location. After a single search I got prompted to install the app to search “privately without tracking”. The app is rated 6/10 privacy by Exodus. Exodus lists “Yandex Ad” as one of the app trackers. Sounds lovely.

The search results are quite similar to the ones I would get on SP or Qwant. Nothing special here. Wikipedia, Maps, IMDb, stuff like that. Incredible.

I also need to do captchas regularly, which is very annoying.

It’s not even particularly fast. Qwant Lite approaches warp speed in comparison.

In conclusion:

This search engine is nothing special. If you need their browser for it to do all the fancy stuff you said, it’s basically a piece of shit. Websites that need browser specific code should not exist.

First of all: Yandex? You’re joking, right?

Secondly: Of course this is not happening. Firefox is an open source browser. If they update it to comply with France’s bs people will just use an older version or people will fork it and cut out the censoring code.

Also, what about lynx or curl? They certainly will not be censoring shit.

France is going to have a very bad time enforcing this.

I didn’t know they were that compatible. That’s awesome!

If you’re in the EU, Taiwan or US, may I suggest a Fairphone? They have open bootloaders and support re-locking. You can get a Fairphone with /e/os pre-installed on murena.com /e/os is great and Fairphone has stellar customer support.

Edit: thanks for helping me discover Kiwix. That’s awesome.