Those who are tired of government blocking, make a $5 droplet in Germany or Netherlands and set wireguard.

When I was in India, I was getting much better speed on vpn compared to direct connection. How can this be possible? Page loads appeared significantly faster through digital ocean server.

I was under impression, VPN adds overhead and reduces speed?.

I often do market research and blocking gets in way, I can decide what website is good for me what isn't. Government shouldn't have any say in that.

I'm fairly annoyed that the list of websites blocked is not made available. Also, how do you block a specific subreddit!?

Countries that block "Wikipedia or something like that" already exist. And citizens, corporations, and governments are fine with it.

>> can just instantly axe access to important services like that.

It isn't that simple. Just look at China. To enforce their internet censorship they have to spend billions on a massive technological complex. But the locals still know how to get around it when necessary. Once upon a time TOR was a complicated little tool requiring multiple layers of software to run properly. Now The Tor Browser is an app that any kid can download and use on any device. The days of governments turning off websites by removing their DNS entries are long gone.

Pretty much. In addition there is no real enforcement to see that only the sites requested are blocked. And ISPs (Jio especially) have started taking creative license with block orders. For a lot of ISPs this blocking is implemented at DNS resolution level, which is easy to bypass (just change your DNS resolver), but the most popular ISP (Jio) does not do it this way, and is pretty much impossible to get around.

But… it was initially blocked when blocking several apps from China. Why would China being able to compromise it make it more likely to be unblocked by India?

Yes I have noticed that ddg is extremely inconsistent over time, sometimes for what I think are almost the same queries. It's also highly variable in its speed - Google is almost always instant, but ddg can vary from the same speed as Google one day, to taking many seconds to load a result the next.

I would like to recommend this to you: https://searx.space.

I have been getting great results across many instances! And while we're at it, also check out these projects:

https://github.com/omarroth/invidious

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

I would speculate that DDG caches its results and then fuzzy-matches them with other search queries (maybe fuzzier and fuzzier based on load). So if you enter a similar query, you may get a previously-cached list of hits, which may or may not be as relevant as if your query was actually run. This is just speculation though