I think what @fritz is getting at is this trend (conspicuously, at least, in the US) toward more and bigger cars and trucks. I’m 41, and I grew up on a cul-de-sac street where all the kids played by ourselves outside until the street lights came on. That was my experience. My parents never seemed to have a worry that we’d take care of ourselves and come home for dinner.
But today, even in that same neighborhood (which we moved away from when I was 10), there are many more cars, and the rise of the pickup truck and SUV has created a minefield for kids. The drivers of most pickup trucks in the US couldn’t see a five-year-old who is less than about 10 feet from the hood. You see parents buying trucks and SUVs because they consider them safer, which is true in the sense that we’re in a battle of who can drive the biggest, heaviest truck. But to pedestrians, they’re fatal. If you’re struck by a car, you roll over it. If you’re struck by a pickup truck, it rolls over you.
The truck problem is mainly regulatory, and it bothers me personally only because I know that the Ford F-150 is the most-sold vehicle in America, and that some 70% of those truck owners don’t use them to haul anything, ever. Now I have a five-year-old son, and we live on a sort of main road in town, and we’re hesitant to let our kid play even in the front yard of our own house. Last year, a distracted driver failed to follow the curve of our street two doors down from us, chopped a telephone pole in half, crashed into a tree and their car caught on fire.
My kid’s bus stop is at a crosswalk on our street, and drivers don’t even slow down for it, even with a bunch of kids and their parents standing there. Something culturally has changed with how drivers behave. We are auto-centric here, and we design our towns and cities to strongly broadcast that.
There’s a fair bit of skepticism about DDG in here, and I’ve heard it before, but I feel like a lot of people are being pretty unfair to them. Are there search engines that don’t ultimately use Google or Bing? Yes, there are. Are they good? It depends on what you mean by that.
It takes enormous resources to index even “most” of the internet on a rapid, ongoing basis. This is the main reason why Google and Bing overall provide the most thorough results. The only independent search engine I would trust is perhaps Neeva, because it’s subscription-based. An engine claiming to be as thorough as Bing or Google that doesn’t take money directly from you is up to something.
A lot of what DDG is trying to do with its browser and search-ancillary features is find some way of making money because they have to pay Microsoft for Bing results.
It’s worth thinking about what our expectations are for search engines. If they must be free, but also not ad-supported and data-gathering… How can they afford to exist?