Disclaimer; I’m not looking for a VPN service, I already have one. I know TechRadar is not a great source too. I am simply doing research around VPNs in general.
I am just wondering why DDG is suggesting this link over a link without a reference? Is this “the blame” of DDG or Techradar? Trying to understand why this is the link being served over others. Appriciate any suggestions.
Very interesting. I could get the same result in ddg, but not on bing. Also with quick testing around, couldn’t get the ref with searching other techradar article. Very alarmingly, it looks like shufliada dot com is some Russian website?
Edit: apparently it’s Ukrainian, not Russian.
My suspicion is that DDG’s crawler looks similar enough to other crawlers and that’s the URL the crawler was provided.
I agree but this thing could be cleaned on DDG’s side.
DDG is suggesting it because it has no custom rules setup to sanitized indexed URLs. Most likely it just means the first link to the article their crawler found has the referral tag in it.
But the plot thickens.
On Bing if I search “TechRadar shufliada” I see a few similar results, including other websites with the same site in the URL.
If I go to the website I find in their about page it says:
The goal of “Shufliada” is simple: to make the Ukrainian language more visible on the Internet/Google search.
Which while it could be innocent, almost suggests they’re intentionally backlinking popular websites in hopes their link to it is what gets indexed. IMO the blame doesn’t lie with either DDG nor TechRadar.
Very interesting indeed, thanks for sharing your findings!
Looks like a pretty benign Ukrainian website. An easy way to distinguish the Ukrainian language from Russian is to look for the letter i. It doesn’t exist in Russian Cyrillic. If you see both i and ë somewhere in the same sentence it is Belarusian since that language has both letters. Russian has ë, but not i, instead they have и for that sound.
There are probably better ways to tell based on grammar and whatnot but this is how I as an ignorant person distinguishes them.
Ah sorry about that, I could have double checked what language it really was. I closed it 2 secs after it had loaded and assumed it was Russian.
I’m about to get into the market for a new VPN, who’s the top dog privacy wise nowadays? Been using TorGuard, but the bulk subscription I purchased will expire this fall, and they have since on-shored their operations.
Use cases at the moment: General/Adblock Occasion p2p/torrent
As someone writing his master thesis about vpns, I would hands down stick with independent VPN providers, such as Mullvad(MozillaVPN - is WL of Mullvad), Windscribe, ProtonVPN and IVPN.
Don’t buy into the Vpns with sketchy parent companies such as Kape Technologies who owns Express VPN, PIA, Cyber Ghost to mention a few…
Mullvad appears to have been review bombed lately due to removal of port forwarding and people say it has back slid recently… any opinions on that?
Proton VPN looks solid though
Mullvad remains top dog when it comes to privacy. You can still torrent without port forwarding, it’s just more limited. If you need port forwarding, then is give Windscribe a go. While most people will recommend ProtonVPN, with good reason, I personally prefer to stick with the underdogs.
This is a fascinating topic for me, I would love to hear your reasoning for sticking with the underdog. Is it just a “stick it to the man” scenario or is there some more practical reason?
I see Mullvad recommended a lot here, but not sure if it’s the best. I would like to know too.
Edit: I just checked out the site and it seems like it would be great. You can pay using Monero, Send Cash, Buy a voucher in store, or using credit card.
You only have an account number and they don’t require an email address. You can add time to your account in 30 days increments.
Just based off of this I trust them more than the ones shilled on YouTube.
They’re based in Sweden.
Yeah I’d say you summed it up well. They also have a great track record. Even when raided by Swedish police last year the police got nothing out of the raid.
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