Honestly yeah. There’s been some controversies in the past, but for someone who’s looking for a zero-effort way to browse privately and support the privacy scene (DDG donates a lot of money) it’s a great choice. Wouldn’t recommend their browser/extensions though
Definitely would agree with this. The best of a bad bunch. I use it for nearly all my search.
Did see some sketchy stuff with the android app/browser so probably would avoid… and besides, I’m in a decades long relationship with firefox <3.
Do you use Firefox on mobile as well? I use the DDG browser and don’t whether I should switch. Haven’t heard what exactly is wrong with it, yet.
I use Firefox almost exclusively on android and have nothing but glowing praise for it, it’s a solid experience
Firefox for Android is great, and after some initial teething problems, it’s been solid for a long time.
I remember seeing on reddit a story about a guy who created something and I think suggested DDG stole some of his work and packaged it up as their own. I cannot find it anymore, but remember seeing it at the time and it seemed convincing (even though I was using DDG search and was a fan of their work). I still use them, but not for everything and I remain skeptical. FF is open source, and has been pretty trustworthy for a long time imho.
Well it’s chrome
Exactly, there’s just no reason to use anything other than firefox on desktop
On mobile IN MY EXPERIENCE Firefox has always been unbearably slow. I’ve tried everything: getting it from play store, F-Droid and github, using the beta and nightly version, tried it with and without extensions: it sometimes took 10+ seconds to load some pages, I don’t know why. It’s been like this on other smartphone models too.
That’s why I use brave from mobile, it’s blazing fast and it has a lot of nice features, starting from the amazing bottom bar to their solid integrated adblocker and dark mode.
i think librewolf is a better browser out of the box
I use both firefox and librewolf om desktop, I recommend both
I’m OOTL on DDG donations? What kinds of projects/people do they donate to, and how does that benefit pirates?
I’m sorry for the confusion, with “privacy scene” I meant orgs that fight for privacy/freedom on the internet, like Tor, EFF, Fight for the future and more. You can see who they donated to from their blog https://spreadprivacy.com/2022-duckduckgo-charitable-donations/
Personally, I found people to be overreacting and DuckDuckGo‘s actions reasonable and transparent. Here’s the story:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-scripts/
I’ve used Startpage until they got bought by an ad company. Haven’t looked into it since then:
Their privacy policy and data flow have been the same since the buyout, they were transparent about any implications and the mitigations put in place to protect users, so I’m alright with it. The biggest problem I have with them is sometimes getting rate-limited because of a VPN or Tor, but that’s it. Alternatives like DDG and Brave Search are usually bad for results in my native language, so I’ve been using Startpage for a couple years now and it’s nice
For me Brave search has pretty good results. Not as Google, of course, but enough. Definetly better than DDG.
Its not about how good. How much privacy. Brave search is worse then DDG in all ways and form. Bad Search Results, Weird to get and read Privacy Policy???, Brave had at sometime a crypto miner in it.
I don’t know why you have problem with Brave Search Privacy. They do log operating system and browser version. Is that scary? You can easily bypass this f.e. by using Chameleon Firefox extension.
They have a quirky privacy policy and it is never good.
I think they mostly handled it well, and ultimately the situation was resolved, but I still think they should have been a lot more up front about what they were doing.
For those who still don’t know and find DDG’s name too long to type out than google, you can just input duck.com and it will redirect you to DDG!
Been using DDG for many years and never new this!
It’s my main search in my browser, so I don’t even type it. Would strongly recommend.
You can also use ddg.gg which is even shorter!
And you don’t even need to go the
websitehomepage, just type something likeddg.gg/search promtand it’ll give you results straight away.This is great even if you use a different search engine because you can use !bangs without needing to go through another webpage.
It’s better than google, and so it’s a good start.
I use it everywhere but the search results are… variable. However it’s plenty good enough for most situations.
I still switch back to Google if I’m not finding what I want (using DDG’s
!gkeyword, which is pretty helpful - just add that anywhere in a search and it’ll send you to Google), but at least I’m only doing that when I’m aware of it.Use
!sfor startpage! It’s essentially a Google proxy with more privacy.TIL, thanks!
deleted by creator
Didn’t DDG get caught allowing some Microsoft tracking and blocking some search results a couple of years back? Personally I use Firefox and starpage as a search engine.
Personally, I found people to be overreacting and DuckDuckGo‘s actions reasonable and transparent. Here’s the story:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-scripts/
I’ve used Startpage until they got bought by an ad company. Haven’t looked into it since then:
That adds interesting context. Thanks for links.
Didn’t know this, thanks for the links.
I think they had a contractual situation that they were navigating. They were transparent about it and resolved that situation quite quickly.
Edit: Due to using Bing as a backend. It was potentially an uncomfortable bind they found themselves in.
Ah, gotcha.
deleted by creator
Yup - tracking and filtering search results; since then I stay away from DDG.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Isn’t DDG essentially a front end to Bing?
yeah, but presumably more anonymous
It’s better than google but It’s not good. Only options is self hosted searxng
Been using a self hosted instance of SearXNG but recently went away from SearXNG in gerneral. Why? Search results more than often enough ended in timeouts from the search engines. It was frustrating and they never fixed it. In terms of privacy it’s top notch though.
deleted by creator
Interesting, my instance has been rock solid. When did you give it a try?
deleted by creator
I’m mobile for the holiday right now, I’m not 100% sure on utilization. But it’s running on a 2 core 4 GB Ubuntu machine along with Caddy and Redis. I also have a Lemmy instance on that same machine so Lemmy, Lemmy-UI, Postgres, and pictr all fit on that machine and work for my daily use.
I can get exact utilization later tonight.
Check out Mull browser. There’s mobile version as well for desktops. Its lightweight Firefox without any of the telemetry.
And for people who need chromium, there’s mulch, a hardened chromium fork with some security patches from vanadium
Thanks for the recommendation. I wonder if you’re confusing the DuckDuckGo browser with the DuckDuckGo search engine. I am assuming the post is about the search engine 🙃
They didn’t define what they mean. Could be both.
NO.
- it is US-based
- the CEO is the former founder of the “Names Database”
for the love of god, use anything but DDG. Qwant is EU-based and has decent results, SearX is another one which lets you choose between instances (or host your own).
please stop taking US “privacy” services seriously. i was hoping people would know better on here, compared to reddit
Kagi for the win!
deleted by creator
It is US based LOL!!!
Yes, it’s good, however you need to be more specific with your query for DDG to return good result.
If you’re interested in other privacy respecting search engines, there’s Searxng and Kagi (paid).
No.
I run a private instance of searxng on a cloud provider. If you have the know how to run Docker or are looking for a reason to learn it’s a pretty painless setup.
Searxng is a meta search engine that aggregates results from a lot of different search engines. You have the ability to configure which search engines it will use. For example you can have it aggregate results from Google, bing, yahoo, brave, DDG, startpage, and quant. You have a layer of abstraction between you and those services providing you extra privacy.
You can run an instance on your laptop/desktop and access it locally which gives ok privacy and protects from JS and other browser level tracking. Problem is your IP can still be correlated to others in the same network who use google or w/e. Also makes accessing from your phone and other devices a bit more difficult especially outside of your LAN as you’ll need to poke a hole through your firewall and use Dynamic DNS for reliable access while mobile.
Another option with better privacy is to run the instance in a public cloud provider like AWS, digital ocean, Linode, etc. This way Google, bing, yahoo, and other search engines just see the IP of your cloud instance making requests. It also makes mobile access easier since your instance will have a static IP that you can assign a DNS name to.
In both cases you can use Caddy as a reverse proxy to serve as the public endpoint. Caddy allows you to easily set up TLS/HTTPS without paying for a certificate.
You elaborated a lot on your alternative setup but not at all why ddg is not good enough for you or in general.
I use an app called TrackerControl on my Android phone, and it caught several trackers on DDG, so I stopped using it. Do I know for certain that the app is absolutely accurate? Nope, but it’s a good FOSS that I have been using for a long time and developed a trust relationship with, so I’ll avoid what it warns me about. App is available on F-droid if anyone wants to try it.
I’ve been using DDG for the last year and pretty happy with it
deleted by creator
They get a lot of info from reddit. Need to start searching Lemmy instead
