• UprisingVoltage@feddit.it
    554·
    1 year ago

    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

    • CrypticCoffee@lemmy.world
      16·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • janonymous@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • FippleStone@aussie.zone
          12·
          1 year ago

          I use Firefox almost exclusively on android and have nothing but glowing praise for it, it’s a solid experience

        • CrypticCoffee@lemmy.world
          3·
          1 year ago

          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.

        • inspxtr@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          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.

      • UprisingVoltage@feddit.it
        03·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • bl4kers@lemmy.ml
      4·
      1 year ago

      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

      • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • cucumberbob@lemmy.world
      4·
      1 year ago

      I’m OOTL on DDG donations? What kinds of projects/people do they donate to, and how does that benefit pirates?

    • stonemilker@discuss.tchncs.de
      6·
      1 year ago

      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

      • FarLine99@lemm.ee
        11·
        1 year ago

        For me Brave search has pretty good results. Not as Google, of course, but enough. Definetly better than DDG.

        • Rooki@lemmy.world
          0·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • FarLine99@lemm.ee
            1·
            1 year ago

            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.

    • dan@lemm.ee
      2·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • FIST_FILLET@lemmy.ml
    332·
    1 year ago

    NO.

    1. it is US-based
    2. 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

  • candle_lighter@lemmy.ml
    211·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • deCorp0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      91·
      1 year ago

      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.

      https://www.tweaktown.com/news/92181/youtube-to-disable-video-playback-for-accounts-caught-too-many-times-with-ad-blockers/index.html

      Then competitors will have to move away from Google’s evil empire making life better for everyone.

    • JoelJ@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 year ago

      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!

    • NicoCharrua@lemmy.ca
      7·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • DocBarkowitz@lemm.ee
    184·
    1 year ago

    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.

    https://github.com/searxng/searxng

    • Kissaki@feddit.deEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      You elaborated a lot on your alternative setup but not at all why ddg is not good enough for you or in general.

      • DocBarkowitz@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • TheButtonJustSpins@infosec.pub
      1·
      1 year ago

      Two questions:

      1. If you use someone else’s searxng instance, they could potentially insert whatever they want into the search results, right?
      2. 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?
      • DocBarkowitz@lemm.ee
        2·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • themizarkshow@lemm.ee
    13·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • codenul@lemmy.ml
    174·
    1 year ago

    Check out Mull browser. There’s mobile version as well for desktops. Its lightweight Firefox without any of the telemetry.

    • snek_boi@lemmy.ml
      6·
      1 year ago

      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 🙃

  • Mario Bariša@vlemmy.net
    131·
    1 year ago

    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

    • Prunebutt@feddit.de
      6·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • QuazarOmega@lemmy.world
        4·
        1 year ago

        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

    • lemmychatwitpeeps@lemmy.ml
      2·
      1 year ago

      For the good balance between privacy and search results i prefer brave over ddg. It gives better results imo. Still use ddg for images

    • oldfart@lemm.ee
      1·
      1 year ago

      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

      • Mario Bariša@vlemmy.net
        11·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • dan@lemm.ee
    121·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • _pete_@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • Milk@lemmy.sdf.org
    132·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • svamp@lemmy.ml
    125·
    1 year ago

    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.