The lack of search engine competition - viable alternatives - remains a rather massive problem in tech. Notepad++ doesn't have much in the way of options, unfortunately.

It sure likes to pretend it does. And ask yourself if that isn't worse than doing nothing.

By that logic we should just throw in the towel and use Google/whatever the biggest player is. I refuse to play by those rules, even if my resistance is ultimately futile.

So by that logic you should use Google (wrong, but let's play along). And by Notepad's logic you should use Google (because it's Bing and Google, that's it). Good job?

DDG is (largely) a pass-through proxy for search from Bing (both Web and image) and for Russian-language media, Yandex. It maintains a number of specific search bots that mostly provide its intsant-answers content.

(This is based on interpretation of very unclearly worded statements and comments from DDG over the years.)

DDG may not censor results itself, but it inherits the censorship policies of its search providers.

(Disclaimer: I've used DDG as my primary Web search for nearly a decade, and Images since DDG image search came online. I'm strongly critical of DDG's relationship to the Tank Man image censorship issue.)

The same results were missing from Duckduckgo too.

The results were missing from DDG ecause DDG gets its results from Bing. It is about the active choice to censor which Bing made, not DDG.

You make a good point in the difference in active choice but to say duckduckgo doesn't censor results is inaccurate is it does even if by proxy of where it sources those results from. I do feel this is a no-win situation for DDG and I don't think anyone should hold this situation against them as they seem to be caught up in it against their will.

"A company did something bad. Let's hurt them by continuing to give them revenue."

Because DDG uses Bing's API. DDG's results are literally the same as Bing's.

Notepad++ should make a statement and drop Microsoft entirely. By moving away from GitHub and dropping support for Windows.

I know what you're thinking. That's my point.

Do you know Notepad++ is a windows appliation?

I think that is what they were intimating in that last sentence. That the Notepad++ devs are implicitly supporting MS (and so Bing) by writing a Windows application.

Notepad++ has been a Windows application long before Bing was even a twinkle in its creator's eye.

Cancelling your technical platform over decisions that its vendor made decades after you originally picked it (and discarding N*17 man-years of your own hard work) smells of a logical fallacy, though I can't pinpoint which one.

You can't pinpoint which one because it's not a logical fallacy. Which makes it extra funny you're reaching for one, just because you find what I have to say uncomfortable. I'm afraid you'd have to satisfy yourself with emotional downvoting and no explanation why you feel this way.

Notepad++ was a Windows app before Bing existed, and Bing was a search engine in Notepad++ before they filtered Tank Man.

The question is are you doing symbolic knee-jerk gestures, but stopping right before it matters, or are you that clueless not to realize everything you do is Microsoft related, before you try and pretend you're going against Microsoft.

You see, everyone wears FUCK THE SYSTEM t-shirt, but then they play along with the system. Communicating one thing and doing another is quite pathetic IMHO, and counter-productive. It shows the cognitive dissonance behind our "pop-morals" if I can call them so, the things we get "outraged" on social media, and the lives we actually have.

I think an intelligent, thinking individual works on those discrepancies in their mind until they arrive at a cohesive (albeit not as simple) worldview where their actions and words match.

But for the rest, there's always the FUCK THE SYSTEM t-shirts, and the SAVE THE NATURE stickers for your gas SUV bumper.

That's what Notepad++ is. Pretending to go against Microsoft by deleting Microsoft's search engine on Microsoft's GIT hosting of their app written for a Microsoft OS.

My worldview is that we have two search engines worth a damn in this world, Google and Bing, and everything else uses their results more or less (yes, including Duck Duck Go). And Google has done a lot more shit than Microsoft to merit a ban if any one should be banned. Yet no one is comfortable banning Google because they dominate. Bing is easier to ban, because they don't matter much. so everyone is directing their cheap outrage in their direction.

Although the Tank Man decision is likely the actions of one person in a tens of thousands of people department, and rejecting their work wholesale due to one transgression like this is ridiculous. Also everyone knows about Tank Man. Even the dogs in China do. So what is this, if not the armchair symbolic issue of the day, where you get to feel you're making a difference by hopping on the right symbolic bandwagon? It's the online version of a bumper sticker.