IIRC they use Yandex (Russian search engine) as a back end. I have nothing to base this on other than that one fact. Anyone have any facts, news or even suppositions?
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dunno about that, but they also use Bing, so security, safety and accuracy is a very low base level…
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I’ve always heard that Bing was the underlying search engine but they could always denounce their Russian source if it ever was from them and people will still use them.
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Maybe, maybe not. Hard to say but you can review some of the code, not all as it’s partly closed source.
Hopefully the OP is not swallowing barrel-loads of hysterical anti-Russian western propaganda and forming the opinion that since a Russian search engine is one its sources, DDG could be compromised. That would be truly sad. Indeed, if that is the insinuation, then mods should delete this thread completely because it breaches forum rules.
Political crap has no place here.
All sources of information are biased. All of them. No exceptions. Flags have nothing whatsoever to do with ‘truth’.
From Sources | DuckDuckGo Help Pages :
DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).
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" … swallowing barrel-loads of hysterical anti-Russian western propaganda … "
And I disagree with that comment and find it more offensive then the comment that you replied to.
War is not Propaganda.
Russia has in FACT invaded a neighboring country.
And is as good as it gets as a reason to be “hysterical”.
I find your comment to fit into the category, as you define it, to be “Political crap” and " then mods should delete this thread completely because it breaches forum rules." applied to it as well. As " barrel-loads of " pro-Russian propaganda.
Goose, meet gander.
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The question is very vague and the OP doesn’t explain the meaning.
Compromised as in, the fact that it has a few searches from sources that some entities don’t like? First off, any search engine presents just information that it crawls from websites, so it doesn’t matter where it gets the results from, it matters what you search. If you actively look for Chinese news, that’s what you’ll get, so you have to pick your source website.
Second, there was a post somewhere on this forum showing a pie chart of duckduckgo’s claims on its “over 100 sources,” with ddg being something like 80% bing, 10% google, yahoo and something and the rest yandex and the other 95-something sources. Like, ddg is basically bing and you can even prove it by searching for an image in both bing and ddg and you will get the same results, almost identical, if not exactly identical and in the same order.
So, compromised as in what? Privacy? I think they are pretty privacy focused (that’s their whole marketing, they would be pulling the rug from underneath themselves). I mean, they may keep some IP addresses and search queries maybe, or if a government agency subpoenas them to log queries from a certain IP, it’s not like they can refuse (they can, but close down shop, so that is unrealistic), so don’t go searching for naughty stuff on it that the bioluminescent boys may not like.
Compromised, as in, security? It’s a search engine that uses javascript, so, if you want security, use the html version (which is a thing).
Compromised, as in, it’s actually mostly bing? Actually, yes, it is compromised in that sense and Russian disinformation is no better than American one. It’s not about if, it’s about that you will get news stories and results coming from propagandists in any country. You have to filter that out yourself (think critically).
Actually I’m getting very accurate results. Not sure why, maybe I know how to search for the right things, but I haven’t used google, nor startpage in more than 6 years now, I think.
I really wish I could find the post on ddg sources with the 80% bing thing, it may have been on the lounge though.
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Thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for. Some years ago I was informed that DDG’s ‘mix’ of sources was rather different than this. It seems either I was misinformed or DDG’s sources have been tweaked since then.
lol i love how this is supposed to be an issue…
oh opera is chinese owned. they will get your search…
yeah and if i use edge?.
at least the chinese wont be knocking on my door anytime soon to tell me i told an off colour joke.
(im not in china 
or canada 
or scotland )
they also aint selling/volunteering my data to data analytics services/governments, like google do.
so would i be worried about the russians seeing my searches via yandex?.
no more than i worry about the cia/nsa/mi5/interpol/us gov/uk gov/can gov/aus gov/nz gov getting my searches.
they are all at it, and none of them can claim to be the good guys.
there all abusing our data.
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DDG is heavily intertwined with Yandex (ru) but they also compare against (read: get results from) Bing and a few other SE’s. If you remember dogpile search it kinda works like that in a way…a very loose way.
Я не знаю, в чем проблема. Я не верю в российское влияние на DuckDuckGo.
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ganda-propa
All I know is when I search something on duckduckgo, i get results in russian. I am not searching for stuff that would be russian related. Like I do a imdb search and get russian or something other than english.
Are you in a Russian state?
All my results come back english.
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Or is he using TOR, is his ISP doing something funky, what DNS does he use…soooo many variables.
Really?
I must have ddg’d like 5 times today, and top links (on mobile) all been English
Vpn set to SE/Gothenburg
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Same.
DDG is all I use. No weird results here.
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I should clarify. Many times there are russian results. not always. Sometimes at the top, sometimes half way down the page.
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Can you share what you are searching for? Have you tried it on another unrelated computer, like at a public library? Maybe your PC is compromised, but more likely there is some ISP shenanigans. Websites think my location is anywhere from Iowa to New Jersey, randomly.
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Cue jokes about how you realized your machine was compromised
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