Mayayana wrote:

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| How is DDG funded?

This seems to be the deal:

DuckDuckGo makes money in two simple ways: Advertising and Affiliate
Marketing. Advertising is shown based on the keywords typed into the search
box. Affiliate revenues come from Amazon and eBay affiliate programs. When
users buy after getting on those sites through DuckDuckGo the company
collects a small commission.

If you'll recall, Google became a giant by posting text-based
ads next to search results. Clean, simple, useful, honest, brilliant.
But then they got greedy and it never stopped.

DDG uses Bing results, so they don't need to have a search
engine. That's also why they're not as good as Google. I use
Google occasionally. It doesn't require script. Though it often
tries to track me by giving me a rigged URL in links that goes
through their site. They don't give webmasters that data anymore,
but they still collect it for themselves.

And why I use StartPage (was ixQuick). It uses the Google search
engine. Google always has more hits total and more relevant, for me,
than does Bing, so I have StartPage as the default (and DDG as an
alternative).

Rather than bother with the drop-down list on a search to use the
default or alternative search engines present there, I defined bookmarks
in a Search subfolder in my Bookmarks with URLs to the search engines
(followed by %s as a placeholder for my search text) along with keywords
in each bookmark. "g firefox" uses Google to search on "firefox". "s
firefox" uses Startpage. "ddg firefox" uses DuckDuckGo. "b firefox"
uses Bing. And a whole slew of other bookmarks with keywords for other
searches, like "gm addrs" for Google Maps, "gn topic" for Google
News, "gi whatever" for Google Images, and so on, and the same for
search types using other search engine sites, like "yt whatever" to
search Youtube, "imdb title" to search the Internet Movie Database,
and "dict word" to search at Dictionary.com. However, those are handy
for use in the address bar. I can use subfolders in my Search bookmarks
folder to group them, like all Google bookmarks are under a Google
subfolder, a Bing subfolder, References for lots of ref sites
(dictionary, IMDB, newspapers, etc), and so on.

I also add the Selection Context Search extension to give me a context
menu of search engines. It uses the same bookmarks for searching by
keyword that I already created under the Search bookmark folder, and
shows the same hierarchy of subfolders for grouping the bookmarks. I
can select some text in a web doc, right-click, and pick where to search
on the text. In my Search bookmarks folder, I have 30 bookmarks with
keywords (to call using the keyword in the addressbar), or to use with
the extension (to access the search engines on selected text in a web
doc).

I can enter text in the addressbar to use the default search engine. Or
I can select one of the other search engines in a short list. Or I can
use a keyword in the addressbar to directly specify which search engine
to use. Or I can use content selection to pick which search engine to
use on selected text using the context menu.

For deobfuscating URLs, like Google's search hits, or any site that
redirects, I use the Unshort.lnk extension. However, looks like Google
removed that trick of redirection (the URL points to themself to track
the destination, and their server then takes you to the redirected site
specified in a url= argument in the URL) a while ago. I haven't seen
the redirection URLs for quite a spell with Google searches.

Might've been because scammers figured out how to abuse Google's
redirect feature. See:

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/202...irect-feature/

Their goo.gl redirection service can obviously be used by scammers, but
then it was shown that Google's redirection service intended only to
track search results (that were clicked on) could also get similary
abused. I haven't used goo.gl, so I don't know if they provided a means
to report abusive redirection URLs using their goo.gl service. With
other redirection services, like tinyurl.com, you can report abuse and
the service owner gets those malicious redirects killed in a day.
Google killed their goo.gl redirection service back in April 2018. Not
sure when they quit using redirection for tracking their search results.

Apparently Google switched to using the OnMouseDown event to track on
which search results you clicked. That requires Javascript, so that
tracking is killed if you use Google Search with Javascript disabled.