• FIST_FILLET@lemmy.ml
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    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

  • UprisingVoltage@feddit.it
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    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
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      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
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        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.

      • UprisingVoltage@feddit.it
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        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.

  • Milk@lemmy.sdf.org
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    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.

  • PlasmaK@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    DDG still spies on you. It still better than google, i guess, but i personaly use disroot’s searx

    • NicoCharrua@lemmy.ca
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      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.

  • knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • candle_lighter@lemmy.ml
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    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.

    • JoelJ@lemmy.world
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      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!

    • Rooki@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The “Privacy Statement” of Brave Search is somewhat weird tbh. Not clear, Obfuscated.

            • 133arc585@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              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.

              • TiffyBelle@lemmy.ml
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                9 months ago

                Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

                • 133arc585@lemmy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  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.

  • codenul@lemmy.ml
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    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
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      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
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    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
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      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
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        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
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      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

  • sunflip@monyet.cc
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Salad@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I’ve been using DDG as my default search as it works with ExpressVPN, Google often requires captcha or sign in.