Privacy

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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.

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Make me feel better about Duck Duck Go Search? (beehaw.org)

submitted 3 weeks ago by A_be_seedy@beehaw.org to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Hi, I've been using the DDG browser and search on and off for a bit. Specifically trying to contain more controversial stuff like politics into it. .

I just searched on the DDG browser with the DDG search, "2026 midterm primary results" hoping to find the 5 states that had primaries last night. The top horizontal scrolling results were all Michigan. Then the fucking AI bot that I thought I turned off. Then finally the real results...except the real results were 100% local to my state. My states primaries were months ago. There is no rewsonvehy my search should have yielded anything local to my state, and certainly not the entire first page.

Can someone shed a light onto why it would have done this? It feels invasive, at least with Google I can pretend that they know my location because I told them. But DDG? Nah, shits weird.

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[–] A_be_seedy@beehaw.org 1 points 3 weeks ago

I mean, sure, I could have had a more specific search. I just assumed that DDG was privacy focused and more or less gave the same search results to everyone.

My states midterms happened months ago, and weren't particularly newsworthy then. Let alone now.

Given the newsworthiness of Michigan, especially, and 4 other states last night, I would have expected to see results skew towards the trending news story as opposed to old, largely irrelevant, results that skew towards knowing who is performing the search.

It's backwards of my expectations with the product. And based on my understanding of how search engines operate, youvare more likely to catch search engine bias with broad sweeping searches, than you would with hyper specific searches. As an example, this search was able to identify that DDG biases location over relevance/newsworthiness. Which is why I asked about it in the community I did.

I wasn't complaining about the effectiveness of the search, rather the privacy concerns.