Gabriel Weinberg is founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, which bills itself as “protecting searchers’ privacy and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results”. He is apparently fine with putting his thumb on the scale, “down-ranking” what he terms “disinformation”. But who decides what is “disinformation”, by what criteria, and, at the risk of sounding Juvenal, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Here is an anecdotal report that DuckDuckGo is on the “diversity hire” bandwagon.
Keep in mind Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” This law has also been attributed to John O’Sullivan, who phrased it “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”
How is Brave Search different? What does “independent” mean?
First, and most important, Brave Search adheres to core principles of privacy. We don’t track you, your searches, or your clicks. Ever. This is far different from the vast majority of search providers, who siphon up every piece of data about your search behavior, and tie it directly to you.
Second, Brave Search operates from an independent search index. An index is the list of billions of web pages, and some basic info about those pages, that search engines draw from to deliver search results. Most search engines—even supposedly “neutral” or “private” ones—don’t do this. They’re just façades that rely exclusively on third-parties for their results. If Big Tech suddenly ceased to function, those other search operators would go offline. Brave Search, meanwhile, would stay fully operational.
Independence means choice: for users—and for Brave—to be safer online, and not be beholden to the privacy invasions, censorship, biases, or economic interests of Big Tech.
Note that Brave Search is based on an independent index. However, for some queries, Brave can anonymously check our search results against third-party results, and mix them on the results page. This mixing is a means-to-an-end toward 100% independence. For full transparency and to measure Brave’s progress toward that goal, Brave provides a “Results independence” metric. This anonymous calculation shows the % of search results that come from Brave versus these third parties. Note that no matter the independence metric, your privacy will always be 100%.
Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
Combine this with the mechanism of SJW entryism, in particular through “Human Resources” departments, and a small beachhead in HR can expand throughout the organisation until the process becomes self-sustaining and accelerates. As David Burge (Iowahawk) famously said:
A peculiar thing about DuckDuckGo – it cannot be uninstalled in the normal fashion. Some of the on-line advice about getting DuckDuckGo out of one’s system describe it as more like a virus rather than an application.
I was naive! When someone promised a way to avoid the evil clutches of Google, I should have remembered that old saying about the frying pan and the fire.
In the episode, Tom also slams the hypocrisy of demonizing Russia (and ordinary Russians) while ignoring humanitarian crises in other parts of the world, such as in Yemen. If humanitarianism were really the motivation behind the present outpouring of support to Ukraine, why is Saudi oil okay (7% of U.S. petroleum imports, the same as Russia, in 2020) while Russian oil is banned? If not humanitarianism, then what are the real motivations of the establishment vis a vis the Ukraine crisis?
Here is how to set Brave (or any other standard interface search engine) as the default search engine in the Chrome browser on Android mobile devices. This may work on Chrome for iOS as well, but I have no such device on which to test it.
When running Chrome, select the Settings page by tapping the “⋮” menu at the top right and selecting “Settings”. On the Settings page, tap the “Search engine” item to show the Search engine page. This will show a list of search engines with the current default checked. If Brave, which will show as “search.brave.com” appears, just check it and you’re done.
However, since Brave is not among the standard list of search engines, proceed as follows. Go back to the main browser window and launch the Brave browser from the explicit URL:
Now do a search for anything at all. When the search results come back, navigate back to the Settings/Search page. You should now see “search.brave.com” in the list of search engines. Select it and it should now be the default browser. To be sure, try a search from the main browser address bar and confirm that Brave displays the search results.
Yes, it is quite straightforward to install another search engine as the default. But I will freely confess to being paranoid: I want to eliminate DuckDuckGo from my system – completely flush that software out of existence, because I now do not know what else it may be doing in the background.
I am looking for alternatives to reinstalling the entire system!
