Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
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, don't know what people are referring to when saying the DDG browser is shifty though
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.
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/
Compared to Chrome their browser is probably better for privacy and also zero-effort, if you can get past the lack of features. I think using it as a private/incognito window is pretty feasible, but yeah, it's hard to recommend as a default browser
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
NO.
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
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!
You can also use ddg.gg which is even shorter!
And you don't even need to go the ~~website~~ homepage, just type something like ddg.gg/search promt and 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 my main search in my browser, so I don't even type it. Would strongly recommend.
Been using DDG for many years and never new this!
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.
Google’s search monopoly is hurting the Internet generally speaking by stifling innovation and pushing normal users into it’s ecosystem by paying companies like Apple billions to make it the default search.
https://www.makeuseof.com/why-google-pays-apple-billions-of-dollars/
My grandmother has been using Google everyday for a decade on her iPhone and didn’t even know until I changed the default settings. We need competitors in this space to make the internet a better place and using any search engine that relies completely on Google’s SEO is perpetuating their market dominance. Hopefully, Google pulls a Reddit like move and makes it ridiculously expensive to access their search services, the way they’re currently experimenting with YT ad blocking.
Then competitors will have to move away from Google’s evil empire making life better for everyone.
expired
It’s better than google, and so it’s a good start.
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.
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 !g keyword, 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 !s for startpage! It's essentially a Google proxy with more privacy.
It is not perfect, but its a good balance in terms of privacy and search results. If you have a high treath model consider making your own self hosted searx search engine ( while using tor if needed ) to further enhance your privacy
I'm curious: Isn't Searx(ng) a bit less useful if you're the only person using it? I thought that pooling of searches make it harder to run targetting algorithms.
Exactly, one can self host if they want, but if their aim is to limit user profiling, they should absolutely make their instance public so they can get mixed traffic through it
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.
It's not perfect, but it's way better for privacy than Google and looks a million times better than Bing. Sometimes the middle path is the best you can hope for / ask of others.
Way better for privacy than Bing, too
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.
Check out Mull browser. There's mobile version as well for desktops. Its lightweight Firefox without any of the telemetry.
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 🙃
It's better than google but It's not good. Only options is self hosted searxng
DDG still spies on you. It still better than google, i guess, but i personaly use disroot's searx
I recently started using Kagi. The search result are super good, and no ads. You do have to pay tho. Another good one I like is presearch. Both of these have their own crawler, unlike most other search engines which rely on bing or Google.
I like DuckDuckGo, but I've been using Brave Search for the AI summarizer feature.
I ditched it after it dropped the operators like quotes, "OR", "AND", and "-" which hampers it's usefulness to me.
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. Plus the founder is pro-censorship and weighting search results based on his own worldview.
At this point Searx is the only viable option, both in terms of privacy and results. Yes it ultimately ends up using the backend of the big three, but with customizable layers of abstraction and behaviour.
I've been using DDG for the last year and pretty happy with it