DuckDuckGo — Privacy, simplified.
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Just figured this might be some welcome news to shout out from the crow’s nest. Haven’t tried it yet myself, so would love some feedback, me hearties!

  • BootlegHermit@kbin.social
    251·
    2 years ago

    Eh, DDG is just as shady as most others. Starting with their contract with MS.

    Basing their browser off of chromium (or Edge and “underlying OS technology” or however they phrased it) just helps to further the Google monopoly.

    “DuckDuckGo uses clear gifs from the domain improving.duckduckgo.com. This is a tracking technique and can be used to collect analytics about your web browser. Whenever you use DuckDuckGo, several requests will be sent to this domain.[4] This is of course not the kind of behavior that you would expect from a privacy concerned website, but there it is. Do you trust DuckDuckGo to collect “anonymous” analytics about you?”
    -- From: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/duckduckgo

    Not that I view that quote as fact of any sort, but something to look into before jumping on the bandwagon so to speak.

    Then of course there’s also DDG’s CEO, Gabriel Weinberg.

    “Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, used to run the Names Database.[1] This was a website that aimed to connect people who had lost contact by gathering lots and lots of e-mail addresses. Getting access could be done by either paying money, or submitting lots of e-mail addresses of other people. Since the service revolved around gathering personal information, it is very suspicious for Gabriel Weinberg to start a business that is privacy-oriented.”
    From: https://archive.is/20150624075735/https://8ch.net/tech/ddg.html and https://archive.is/N2qe8

    So the real advice as to what browser to use? Use whatever one you want that has the features you like and enjoy. Anything else is a gamble in terms of support, security, compatibility, and usability.

    • Sp00ky94@lemmy.fmhy.ml
      91·
      2 years ago

      DDG was also caught downranking search results or censoring them. Regardless of what is being censored I don’t think it should be up to the company to decide for individuals. It should be the individual who does their own due diligence and decides for themselves what they want to believe.

      Here is the article.

      • Bulldozer0781@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        1·
        2 years ago

        Yep, I’ve had issues searching for some things on Google before where I could tell Google was adding a political leaning bias, censoring things, or just deranking certain content heavily. So I thought DDG would be a good one to try out with the same searches but I still found it had similar issues. I brought out Yandex and was easily able to find the results I was looking for on the top results.

        Now I am sure Yandex also censors stuff too, but its definitely my go to if I’m trying to find things on certain political topics from views Google disagrees with, or for finding things related to piracy.

        Honestly getting a bit sad how not even something as generic as a search engine can be free from political censorship.

        • Sp00ky94@lemmy.fmhy.ml
          2·
          2 years ago

          I haven’t used Google in a while. I have been using Brave Search and it has been good. They don’t rely on any of the big search engines anymore either. They have been building their own index. Right now they only rely on Google and Bing search for image search.

            • Distributed@lemmy.world
              1·
              2 years ago

              Try out searxng! It aggregates from multiple sesrch engines.

              I find that, with companies that roll their own search algorithm that the results are often… lacking. I also don’t trust brave as they try to push their crypto on you.

              For what its worth, on the browser side of tbings, I run firefox w/ arkenfox

    • aranym@lemmy.name
      71·
      2 years ago

      improving.duckduckgo.com is not something they try to hide, you can easily disable it in your search engine settings. DDG was launched in 2008 and has a pretty solid track record - I think we can forgive the Names DB thing at this point.