I continue my tradition of noting search engines that show up in our Koko Analytics referrer list with a look at Oscobo. Oscobo a search engine, or wrapper, which claims to be privacy-friendly – stating that it does not collect or share personal information, does not use third party tools, and also encrypts traffic. Do its claims hold up, or is Oscobo the new Lukol? My surface assessment leads me to conclude that Oscobo is acting in good faith. Its privacy-policy is reasonably strong for its niche (albeit, it has not been updated since 2017), and uBlock Origin only reports first-party scripts on Lukol’s website. One thing its website conspicuously admits is the source of its search results. A few searches led me to conclude Oscobo, like most “privacy” search engines in the marketplace, uses Bing’s index – and my hunch was confirmed by a 2016 article about Oscobo. Oscobo touted itself as a UK-based alternative to DuckDuckGo. I will say having tried a few searches, it does not seem Oscobo offers anything in terms of a search experience that one would not find on DuckDuckGo and Qwant (limiting our inquiry to Bing wrappers), and it does present a significant number of Bing-sourced ads (clearly labeled) that push results down the page. But useability and usefulness aside, Oscobo does seem to follow through on its broad promises and privacy policy.
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Jul 2022