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
It is US based LOL!!!
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.
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.
What’s wrong with startpage.com?
Starpage was bought by an advertising company.
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!
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 my main search in my browser, so I don’t even type it. Would strongly recommend.
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.
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 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.
Isn’t DDG essentially a front end to Bing?
DDG still spies on you. It still better than google, i guess, but i personaly use disroot’s searx
I ditched it after it dropped the operators like quotes, “OR”, “AND”, and “-” which hampers it’s usefulness to me.
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.
Yup - tracking and filtering search results; since then I stay away from DDG.
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.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.
