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Add privacy respecting search engines to the default set #196

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sphh opened this issue May 19, 2020 · 3 comments
Open

Add privacy respecting search engines to the default set #196

sphh opened this issue May 19, 2020 · 3 comments

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@sphh
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sphh commented May 19, 2020

Describe your suggestion
There is already Duckduckgo in the default set of search engine. But there are many more, so I would like to ask if you could please add more privacy respecting search engines to the default list. Please put them into a prominent place.

Some suggestions are:
Swisscows: https://swisscows.ch/web?query={searchTerms}
SearX: https://www.searx.me/?q={searchTerms}; https://searx.me/static/themes/oscar/img/favicon.png
Ecosia: https://www.qwant.com/?q={searchTerms}
Qwant: https://www.qwant.com/?q={searchTerms}

And for maps:
OpenStreetMap: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query={searchTerms}; https://www.openstreetmap.org/assets/favicon-32x32-76de1055b40f75be27792fdfc07df23963926c47648cc66d0189c87827ebeea2.png

Thanks.

@CanisLupus
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Hi! I could add more engines by default and I'm all for privacy-focused websites and services, although I have to balance what gets included in SSS versus what people want to include.

Just a few things for consideration:

I tend to include popular search engines because I feel that they are helpful for the greatest number of people. For example, people who don't know what Swisscows is will most likely never even try to use it, and would even prefer it completely disabled.

Even when I add popular engines I tend to disable them by default because:

  1. The default shouldn't be a giant popup full of icons. ;)
  2. If I enable them by default, SSS has to include the icon cache for that engine in the code, because the user might never visit the options page (where usually the code downloads the icon images into cache).

This all said, I'm not against adding more engines, I just have to carefully consider which ones and how. ;) Ideally SSS would have a whole database of engines you could search and add, but there's no way I'd have time to manage that for a free addon. :p

Cheers for the suggestion!
Daniel

@sphh
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sphh commented May 19, 2020

Thanks, Daniel, for your reply and explanation.

I fully agree with Swisscows! And I also see, that not too many search engines should be included. But it should be taken into consideration that if people never see any alternatives, they will think, there is none!

So my personal suggestion is to include the following (in this order):
Duckduckgo
Google
Bing
...
OpenStreetMap
Google Maps

This would promote the privacy conscious search engines, but still keep the so-called ordinary customer happy, who is just looking for names s/he knows. S/he might even try the privacy-focused website, even just by accident, and might find it as good or even better. Who knows? That's what I call to beat them at their own game ;-)

BTW thanks for this excellent add-on. It's one I use every day and very often!!

@CanisLupus
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You also have a good point when you say that if people never see alternatives they won't know they exist. ;) I'll think about all this for a future update.

Oh and you are welcome! Glad you like it. :)

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