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
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:
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!
Yeah but I find their search results aren't as good an non-private options like Google. So I've always preferred search private engines that provide Google results. Startpage is a great one but if you want one that is open source LibreX is excellent and is better than other FOSS search engines like SearX and Whoogle IMO.
DDG was known as the best option for search engines but then they started talking of censoring stuff and also it has Microsoft trackers and other problems. Yes, it is still better than Google, Bing and Yandex when talking of privacy but with search engines like Qwant and specially SearX (SearXNG) there's no reason to use DDG over these.
It’s better than google, and so it’s a good start.
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.
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.What's wrong with startpage.com?
I ditched it after it dropped the operators like quotes, "OR", "AND", and "-" which hampers it's usefulness to me.
Hell yeah. I consider myself privacy paranoid and have been using DuckDuckGo for 5 years without any problems so far. It is pretty strict about its privacy policy.
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).
I use DDG every day as my default search engine across desktop & mobile. It’s good but the search isn’t as always as helpful as Google. If you need to you can just add !g to the search terms and get redirected to Google.
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 as my default search as it works with ExpressVPN, Google often requires captcha or sign in.
Its shady for many reasons... I quit using it
I read an article on tor about the problems with many "privacy respecting" search engines, including ddg, here: https://digdeeper.club/articles/search.xhtml
I've been using DDG for the last year and pretty happy with it
AFAIK, most indexes ddg uses come from bing. So it's not really a search engine with its own indexes on its own. I'd suggest using SearX, and if one is willing to sacrifice a bit of privacy over some data and stats gathering, then SearxNG.
There will always be some compromises and depends on your thread model. While DDG is not perfect, I still use it daily as it's not GOOGLE. I also try other search engine as well like Brave.
Nah, you should avoid it unless you really want to search for a specific image -- search.brave.com respects your privacy and is not compromised.
Is DDG’s search results good, better, or about the same as Google or Bing?
Is DDG’s search results good, better, or about the same as Google or Bing?
