“pretty sure I was on a private tracker” - well there’s your problem right there. You probably weren’t. Not saying that you’re lying or the like, but just so we’re clear, Im differentiating between “Demonoid private” wherein everybody could create an account damned near whenever, and “UHD private” wherein it relies on a system of invites and/or interviews.
I find that most VPNs are so heavily shilled that by that very nature, makes them suspect. Since the days of Napster, WinMX, Bearshare and the like, I’ve gotten exactly 2 “Hey, knock it off” letters from my ISP. And they were both from new-release, mouse-affiliated movie releases from a public tracker.
Get in with some of the private trackers and 99.9% of the worry disappears. Try not to upload terabytes of data, and the majority of ISPs (I mean, two of the 3 that seem to have the monopolies at least) wont even bother sending the notices.
Even then, there’s the theory/circumstantial “evidence” that Google’s indexing is a big farce. Forgot where I saw the video, but someone pointed out that the average person only relies on the 1st page or two of search results. To try to go beyond that, most searches very quickly drop from “millions of results” down to a few hundred/thousand at best. Going beyond the first couple of search result pages, the page count seemingly drops off a cliff.
However, there are independent engines out there. The first one that pops to mind is Gigablast, which does it’s own indexing/crawling.
If you’ve got some time to kill, check out some stuff related to the “Dead Internet Theory”. While I cant say how accurate the information presented may be, it certainly opens up the idea that there’s something funky about the internet and how we perceive it.
Meh, I’m not too keen on the change from simple checkboxes for options to the toggle switch style. Even though they’re functionally the same, the toggle switch just seems less intuitive.
Eh, DDG is just as shady as most others. Starting with their contract with MS.
Basing their browser off of chromium (or Edge and “underlying OS technology” or however they phrased it) just helps to further the Google monopoly.
Not that I view that quote as fact of any sort, but something to look into before jumping on the bandwagon so to speak.
Then of course there’s also DDG’s CEO, Gabriel Weinberg.
So the real advice as to what browser to use? Use whatever one you want that has the features you like and enjoy. Anything else is a gamble in terms of support, security, compatibility, and usability.