Originally I was going to call this saga «A very subtle poison called freedom", In honor to an infamous phrase by María Julia Alsogaray, and also by what the Spanish version of prism-break.org says about search engines:
“Startpage is proprietary, hosted in the United States and the Netherlands, and provides anonymized Google results (including images). DuckDuckGo is partially proprietary, hosted in the United States, and provides anonymized results from Bing. Pick your poison! "
How does a search engine work? Quite easy.
1) A spider visits your web page, entering by root, read ALL the content and creates a list of what it has found.
(If you have configured a robots.txt you can indicate which spider can look at such content and which spider cannot.)
2) The information is indexed according to the internal algorithms used by the search engine
3) This information is taken to a central where it is stored.
4) When someone performs a search, and the system shows all the websites that contain the searched word or phrase.
seeks y yacy they are search engines too but, in addition to being free alternatives, do anonymous searches (via proxy), do not include advertising and be less prone to censorship, they are search engines decentralized. However both very different in focus.
On the one hand Yacy is a decentralized search engine PURO, now that it has your own P2P spider which searches between the active nodes and collects the content. Instead Seeks is rather a meta-seeker (as duckduckgo) that performs anonymous searches on centralized search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) but has a decentralized filter, each node shows the results it wants to show.
Speaking of other things and in a comparative plan three things emerge:
1) Many blame Yacy's bad results and it is because it returns results only from what the crawler collects and depending on the active nodes. Seeks doesn't have that problem as it searches central servers and then each node filters the results.
2) Yacy is easier to install and configure than Seeks (I say it from experience, I already tell you how), in addition to being multi-platform.
3) P2P search uses broadband and is slow. DuckDuckGo comes out ahead of the two.
To install Yacy (requires OpenJDK6): Download source package, unzip it (there is no need to compile it), in the directory run sh StartYacy.sh, open a browser, enter localhost: 8090 (it can be changed) and that's it. There are also packages for Gentoo, Debian, Opensuse, and Arch.
To install Seeks: Install libevent and choose to download the packages for Debian, Arch, Ubuntu and Gentoo, or download the source code and compile it. Enable the httpserv plugin (so that the computer is just another public node), open a browser, enter ss / websearch-hp and that's it.
To include searches for Yacy in Seeks: Have Yacy Running, modify a file and restart Seeks (you have to restart seeks every time a configuration file is touched).
They can also try using public nodes, both in yacy as in seeks. And with this there is this article. I for now I stay with the duckling and his mighty bangs
Good projects, both of you. This decentralized search has is very good.
Good contribution! How does this affect our privacy?
By the way, I don't know in arch, but in manjaro I can't install it yet. (I have libevent installed).
It only does anonymous searches.
Here I leave you the ! bangs
You can make a complete profile of your person just by knowing what you search with google, and they do. You also skip the possible censorship, although it is not so great in Latin countries. Duckduckgo explains it better here.
http://donttrack.us/
http://dontbubble.us/
The topic of the post is so didactic (I did not know these engines) and informative that I was encouraged to thank. By the way, for those who want to investigate and know a little more about Yacy, I leave this link where they can also download it.
http://yacy.net/es/
I support the super shoe because of how cool it is.
Excellent contribution! Congratulations!
Thanks for the info. I didn't know DuckDuckgo used Bing's results, I guess that's why it didn't seem so effective.
Other than this, what is known about ixquick? On their own website they advertise that he is "the most anonymous" but he does not appear on the prism-break list. And I like its efficiency and aim. Can we find out more about this service?
Thanks a thousand for the blog. Regards.
ixquick is practically the same as startpage, which if it appears in the prism-break list, is the same company, only that startpage shows anonymized results from google and ixquick from bing, google, yahoo and others. They themselves say they have the same privacy policy.
Thank you very much for the information. Added to search box.
Well, these days I have been using Bing in an alternative way and you know what? It doesn't seem so bad to me. It is very fast and also, I love the way it displays the images. 😉
And what real difference is there between using duckduckgo, starpage or google if all 3 are proprietary ???? So far I've always used google by default, I've only been testing duckduckgo for a few days.
I am still encouraged to leave google for someone else but it is still more paranoia than anything else, I do not see that it is harmful to use google apart from advertising or that it stores my searches, come on I am not a terrorist who is dedicated to looking for "sensitive" information like that I don't think we have to worry more than necessary about these issues.
Supposedly the difference is that Duck²Go doesn't keep track of your preferences and such.
The difference between google, yahoo, bing and duckduckgo and startpage is that even though the latter are proprietary they do not store your searches or ip, in addition to not creating any preferred profile like google (which it uses to give personalized results).
In addition, they do not save cookies in your browser unless you indicate so, and the preference cookies that they save are the language or color changes that you make to the search engine, even startpage allows you to generate a URL with the search preferences changed in case that you do not want to save cookies in the browser.
Yacy I've always been interested, but I don't understand how it works below (a popular article would be cool 😉), for example my first question is:
- Where is the data extracted from a node crawler when it disconnects from the network?
- Do you have an algorithm that prioritizes that data to replicate it to the other nodes?