652
Google Maps renames “Lake Ontario” to “Lake America” even faster than US government
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2026
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They have a long standing corporate deal with microsoft.
The details are vague but this is not hidden, or kept secret.
Ddg has themselves said that the policy that required them to give exclusive acces to Microsoft trackers no longer applied and now blocks them since 2022. This is on the Wikipedia i shared.
But if you read between them lines. They are following Microsoft policies, if they are now allowed to block those trackers its because microslop allowed them to do so.
Tech companies only do such thing if they have incentives. A more covert way to get the same data, a long term plan to acquire and otherwise for PR.
Searxng also uses those same search querys but without corporate deal. Thats why if you refresh a lot you hit an api limit.. any search engine that does not do that while using these trackers is somehow paying or bartering for access.
The wiki referance linked and subsequent article talk about trackers on the DDG browser not about search queries. DDG have a corperate license with Microsoft, sure, but any amount of line reading on or between seems conspirital at best.
Looks like this corperate contract with Microsoft is a secret especially if you have to "between the lines" read about a completly seperate product.
And i go to a publicly hosted instance of searxng and immediatly get told the past 10 search queries? Dosent seem magicaly private to me. To which your response might be "its designed to be selfhosted. " Sure that maybe the case, but we are just putting extra lines on this social contract to read between now. Not terrible but not perfect, which is the same area DuckDuckGo is playing in so i am prepared to take them at their word.