#Cloudflare has now surpassed MitMing *1/3rd* of the world's websites, controlling a staggering 34%. And yet privacy seekers naively continue to use so-called "privacy focused" search engines like #DuckDuckGo, which neglects to filter out Cloudflare sites from the results.
@resist1984 A search engine should not filter ANY sites from the results...
@datenschutzratgeber If you know of a client-side app that can push junk results down to page 20 so the server can send /all/, I'd be keen to know about it. Until then, we count on search engines not just to find shit but also to organize by putting the best results in view and hide the garbage. Research has shown that a link in search results is *twice* as likely to get clicked than the link below it.
@datenschutzratgeber to say "A search engine should not filter ANY sites" grossly misunderstands the purpose of a search engine. If a search were to return the whole index known to the engine, you would learn very quickly the value of filtering search results. Filtering is the core activity of what search engines do.
@resist1984 I was talking about filtering sites from the search results, not from the search index. Of course, a search engine is supposed to only display relevant results but removing sites from the list because they use Cloudflare is just paternalism.
Also, the search engine would have to maintain an ever-changing second index of Cloudflare sites.
@datenschutzratgeber #Cloudflare results are irrelevant to privacy seekers. There is plenty of choice for privacy-ambivilous users (Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo [#DDG is falsely positioned]). Filtering CF sites doesn't need a site index, just CIDRs. Ss filters out CF sites just fine, and that's basically a garage operation on a shoestring budget.
But if you filter Cloudflare sites, you should also filter the ones that use tracking etc. Which basically reduces the result list by 60+ %.
What's "Ss"? Does that work on a large scale?
@datenschutzratgeber Luckily we're not on a slippery slope here. We can easily nix the worst ~34% and still function. At large scales, nixing the 34% big offenders would have the effect of shrinking the 34% (sites want to be found).
@datenschutzratgeber Ss is handling the current scale just fine but it has a breaking point, which is why other search engines calling themselves "privacy focused" need to actually become privacy focused.
