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!
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It is US based LOL!!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
DDG still spies on you. It still better than google, i guess, but i personaly use disroot’s searx
Got a link?
DDG states in their privacy policy they dont store any of your search results and doesnt sell your Data. But yeah searx(ng) is still better
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.
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The “Privacy Statement” of Brave Search is somewhat weird tbh. Not clear, Obfuscated.
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https://lemmy.world/post/1510069 :) I am very pleased to tell you Brave is shabby af
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Edit: My comment below was based on a faulty understanding of how EDDM mailers worked and a faulty assumption I based on that ignorance. What they did in reality is little more than sending out spam mail, it was not a privacy violation.
Purely from a privacy standpoint, however, there has never been an indication they have violated users’ trust in that regard.
That’s simply not true though.
They have sent out direct mailers that basically equated to a customer list leak.
In regards to the mailers, they messed up and passed blame,
In this process, our EDDM vendor made a significant mistake by not excluding names, but instead including names before addresses, resulting in the distribution of personalized mailers.
I hope you consider a customer list leak to be a breach of privacy. And seeing how they didn’t take responsibility but tried to pass blame, they didn’t take such a mistake very seriously or respond in a manner that instills further trust.
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I think you may be right actually. When I read this
In this process, our EDDM vendor made a significant mistake by not excluding names, but instead including names before addresses, resulting in the distribution of personalized mailers.
from their statement, I made an assumption because I didn’t look at how EDDM works. The way I read “not excluding names, but instead including names” was: We sent a list of names to the vendor; the vendor was supposed to exclude those names, and mail to everyone else in the ZIP, but instead, they mailed to only those names. It seems that’s not an accurate understanding of the situation. I think the correct reading is: we said “no names” on our EDDM mailers but they acted as if we said “yes names” on our EDDM mailers.
From my original interpretation, that is essentially a customer list leak, or at least a ‘localized’ customer list leak, especially for anyone in a shared living environment where someone else may see the name printed on a Brave mailer and learn that that person is a Brave user.
Thanks for clearing it up though. Let me try to go back and edit a few previous comments where I’ve said this to clarify.
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.
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.
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You know I’ve been using both DDG and google for years, google on my work computer and DDG at home. I too have found google is a little better, but the past few weeks at work I’ve have occasionally found the google results insufficient, so I’ve tried DDG on a whim and it’s actually given me better results!
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.
Plus one for Kagi.
It’s pretty decent!
What’s wrong with startpage.com?
Starpage was bought by an advertising company.
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.
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.
I went away from it because it seemed to have a memory leak and the docker container would eventually crash. I never truly investigated what was causing it.
I’ve been meaning to give whoogle a try:
That’s weird, I never had memory leak problems.
I don’t like Whoogle because of their UI for image searches. Imo it’s really bad but that’s just my opinion. The image search is also the reason why I don’t use Brave Search because it redirects you to Google or Bing. What’s the point in being “a privacy respecting search engine” when you get redirected to Google and Bing which are the worst search engines in terms of privacy?
How much RAM is yours using?
None - I deleted it because I don’t use it anymore. It wasn’t much though and it never bloated, even when running for over a whole month.
It wasn’t much though and it never bloated, even when running for over a whole month.
Did you actually check on it, or did you just not notice a problem so you’re stating this? No offense, but you haven’t verified anything, and seem to just be recalling there wasn’t a problem.
I mean, what is “not much,” to you? Because I asked someone else what it was using who also thought it was running well for them, and after only 1 day of uptime it was idle at 350MB of RAM… which is way too high for an idle search engine in my opinion. Another thing, if you were running it in a docker container and had it set to restart=unless-stopped it could have been restarting without you even knowing about it.
No, I didn’t check because it never got so big to the point where it would become suspicious to me that something might be wrong. Maybe it uses more RAM than other self-hosted search engines but it never leaked memory so it used more and more RAM the longer the instance ran. Just because it uses much RAM it doesn’t mean it’s leaking memory. It might just be developed badly, not very caring about your ressources.
I ditched it after it dropped the operators like quotes, “OR”, “AND”, and “-” which hampers it’s usefulness to me.
