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
+1 for Firefox on android.
Just a note, the last time I used DDG browser on android while on VPN, the browser had some IP address leak. Not sure whether they fixed it.
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’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
Why not use Firefox for a privacy browser?
I use it as my default phone browser. I like it just because it doesn’t have any history at all unless you whitelist a site (they call it fireproofing). Not that I don’t want anyone to see what I’ve looked at on the internet, but because I don’t care what I’ve already seen.
The other browsers, and especially searches, all pop up your most recent searches. They keep a history of it. Even fucking wikipedia does it. It’s annoying. DDG is just simply there, and that’s a great experience for me when I browse.
All the privacy stuff went out the window years ago. I’m not concerned with all that.
Agree
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.
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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Does not really matter. US can ask another countrys authorities for information. Just look at what happend with protonmail
It is US based LOL!!!
Does not really matter. US can ask another countrys authorities for information. Just look at what happend with protonmail
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.
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.
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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!
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.
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.
Fair point. Because I don’t have control over my information when directly utilizing a service that I do not own. I don’t trust DDG or any search engine to honor their commitments. In the specific case of DDG they are basically a proxy for Microsoft ad syndication and any of the tracking that comes along with that.
Also back to why I prefer searxng over any single search engine. If one engine decides to censor results, chances are all of them have not and searxng will combine results from all of them so it helps mitigate censorship.
My decision to use searxng while is in part due to DDG being in bed with Microsoft, ultimately it’s due to the entire search engine ecosystem being sketchy.
Well that’s annoying. I edited the comment above and for some reason Lemmy says it was deleted :/
I see two comments now. Seems to me like the editing worked.
Fair point. Because I don’t have control over my information when directly utilizing a service that I do not own. I don’t trust DDG or any search engine to honor their commitments. In the specific case of DDG they are basically a proxy for Microsoft ad syndication and any of the tracking that comes along with that.
Also back to why I prefer searxng over any single search engine. If one engine decides to censor results, chances are all of them have not and searxng will combine results from all of them so it helps mitigate censorship.
My decision to use searxng is in part due to DDG being in bed with Microsoft, ultimately it’s due to the entire search engine ecosystem being sketchy.
Two questions:
- If you use someone else’s searxng instance, they could potentially insert whatever they want into the search results, right?
- If I wanted to run my own so I know that’s not happening, would Oracle Free Tier be an okay place to put it?
For #1 theoretically yes they could likely also censor results. This would mean they modified/forked searxng to do so since as far as I know there is no “feature” implemented that lets the admin modify search results beyond configuring which search engines are queried.
For #2 I’m not sure what oracle’s free tier looks like but I guess if it’s free you could give it a shot. I’d say you probably want a VM with at least 1GB of ram and then limit the searxng container to 512MB of ram in docker. 1GB might be tight with the other services that run with it like redis and a reverse proxy like Caddy or NGINX, but could probably be done. I’m using a 2 core 4GB RAM instance and it has plenty of headroom that allows me to self host other small services.This small implementation is obviously sized to be used on a small scale that maybe you and your family and friends use privately, a more public instance would obviously require more resources.
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.
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Yup - tracking and filtering search results; since then I stay away from DDG.
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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
No wtf. If you use tor and searx you will not look like everyone else. The whole point of tor is to make everybody look the same. The only configuration in tor that should be made is the security setting
There is a difference if you want to make yourself look like everyone by design or if you use Tor, if you use Tor your real identity can not be traced back to you so there is no point in making yourself look like everyone else. But then again this is only for individuals that have high-threat models.
Torproject themself does not recommend changeing settings since it makes you stand out. It is much worse if you are self hosting searx and using it in tor since searx is then linked to you since you are selfhosting it.
This comment is worded very optimistic. There are plenty of ways to leak your identity using tor. Or any other tech for that matter.
Yeah so there is no reason to make it worse. Torproject themself does not recommend changeing settings It will make you stand out.
It works great with VPNs, Tor, or with JS disabled. It does not store tracking cookies. As long as you don’t let them know who you are,it’s privacy is good enough
For the good balance between privacy and search results i prefer brave over ddg. It gives better results imo. Still use ddg for images
Yeah Brave search is great imo. They need to add image search now.
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!
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I haven’t had this issue for a long time now, I’ve maybe done a Google search once in the last year and the results from it weren’t any better than those from DDG, plus the amount of excess shit on a Google SERP makes them utterly useless you are looking for the exact thing they’ve built a page for.
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
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 🙃
They didn’t define what they mean. Could be both.
And for people who need chromium, there’s mulch, a hardened chromium fork with some security patches from vanadium
Isn’t DDG essentially a front end to Bing?
It’s more than that.
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.
Interesting, my instance has been rock solid. When did you give it a try?
It was probably about a year ago now, so I probably should spin it up again. I think I’ll do that today.
How much RAM does yours use?
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.
docker stats --no-stream CONTAINER ID NAME CPU % MEM USAGE / LIMIT MEM % NET I/O BLOCK I/O PIDS dd2a774ad1a6 lemmy_lemmy-ui_1 0.00% 42.5MiB / 3.82GiB 1.09% 418kB / 7.24MB 2.65MB / 0B 15 718629b5514f lemmy_lemmy_1 0.03% 6.82MiB / 3.82GiB 0.17% 1.52MB / 1.48MB 864kB / 0B 5 0c944dccc1e1 lemmy_postfix_1 0.00% 4.762MiB / 3.82GiB 0.12% 3.74kB / 0B 0B / 762kB 7 7f939790561c lemmy_postgres_1 0.00% 46.45MiB / 3.82GiB 1.19% 1.09MB / 1.44MB 24.6kB / 2.16MB 9 14c7db5ae7ec lemmy_pictrs_1 0.08% 23.36MiB / 690MiB 3.39% 3.81kB / 0B 0B / 0B 13 3695b8a0b67a caddy 0.00% 9.984MiB / 3.82GiB 0.26% 0B / 0B 34.1MB / 12.3kB 9 12c8bd7c1cdf redis 0.21% 3.555MiB / 3.82GiB 0.09% 101kB / 78.8kB 7.06MB / 0B 5 f03c3298de46 searxng 0.01% 349.9MiB / 3.82GiB 8.94% 9.21MB / 3.82MB 61.4MB / 61.4kB 25I guess it is the largest consumer of memory. Unfortunately I rebooted yesterday, while setting up lemmy I noticed there was a decent amount of OS security updates. Otherwise I probably would have had stats from like 6 months of uptime. I’ll keep an eye on it and see if it balloons.
Thanks for reporting back on it.
Yeah, even that, I just don’t understand why a search engine, sitting idle, consumes that much memory. The largest consumers of memory for me are: Omada Controller, Airsonic-Advanced, HomeAssistant, Lidarr, Sonarr, Paperless… all things that process a lot of data, or are written in Java, so it’s to be expected they use more resources.
I would see it grow to 600MB+ and occasionally crash, so I just decided to use public instances.
