Oh, gotcha. Yeah, honestly mixing my browser & search engine has a bad smell to it, whether it’s google, Microsoft or DDG providing them. I don’t want to give anyone that level of end-to-end control.

yeah you’re right. The DDG Android browser has been my default up until now

Yes, I remember hearing something about this.

I wonder if there’s a way to federate a search engine. I wonder what that would even look like. Federating indices/results but allowing users to search from whatever instance they want? Maybe?

Maybe that’s an okay use case for federation or maybe not, but clearly we need to move away from centralised search engines because they always get corrupted by greed.

I understand your concern, this is actually why I dropped Ecosia (because they got closer to Microsoft)

It’s worth mentioning that DDG has since distanced themselves from Microsoft after the blow back, so while Ecosia got closer, DDG (AFAIK from the documentation I read) no longer has any partnerships in place. I don’t get paid either way, so it doesn’t matter to me but just FYI

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-scripts/

https://spreadprivacy.com/more-privacy-and-transparency/