So ddg is down, so I visit Google. It’s been some years.
I just can’t believe how poor it’s results are, and how it’s trying to suggest things it think I might also want (and failing miserably).
I just assumed ddg would be the lesser, but I use it for privacy. Turns out I’m wrong.
How long has Google been this bad?
If you’re using DDG for privacy, then indeed you are wrong.
It may be “less invasive” than google, but it’s neither anonymous, nor private.
Direct privacy abuse:
DDG was caught violating its own privacy policy by issuing tracker cookies.
DDG’s app sends every URL you visit to DDG servers. (reaction).
DDG is currently collecting users’ operating systems and everything they highlight in the search results. (to verify this, simply hit F12 in your browser and select the “network” tab. Do a search with javascript enabled. Highlight some text on the screen. Mouseover the traffic rows and see that your highlighted text, operating system, and other details relating to geolocation are sent to DDG. Then change the query and submit. Notice that the previous query is being transmitted with the new query to link the queries together)
DDG is accused of fingerprinting users’ browsers.
When clicking an ad on the DDG results page, all data available in your session is sent to the advertiser, which is why the Epic browser project refuses to set DDG as the default browser.
DDG blacklisted Framabee, a search engine for the highly respected framasoft.org consortium."
CloudFlare:
DDG promotes one of the largest privacy abusing tech giants and adversary to the Tor community: CloudFlare Inc. DDG results give high rankings to CloudFlare sites, which consequently compromises privacy, net neutrality, and anonymity.
Full article: http://techrights.org/2020/07/02/ddg-privacy-abuser-in-disguise/
ETA: The bulk of the text in my reply was lifted from a reddit comment. I tried to format my comment to reflect that it’s a “quote”, alas I’ve failed. Hence this.
Also, I don’t have a card in this game. I understand anonymity and privacy - I dislike intentional deception.
What to use them, if not DDG
I’m currently using searx.be with good results
Searx improved a lot since I last used it. Was really slow before
Its searxng now (the original searx is dead) and is quite good. Performance differs. I’ve seen very slow instances, but when I started hosting my own semi-private instance, I saw how fast it can be, if the server isn’t a potato.
How can I set it as default browser on Android Brave?
Not able to do it
Sorry, but I don’t know how to do that. I use Cromite, not Brave.
Mojeek isn’t perfect, but it’s truly independent search engine.
and when people let us know where we fall down we’re able to make it better, growing alongside the userbase!
I’ve collected these 3 so far, but Swiss Cows if you go deep enough uses Bing. I’m not sure about Mojeek or Start Page.
Swisscows does use Bing, Startpage uses Bing and/or Google depending upon where you are, we are fully independent: https://www.searchenginemap.com/ is a visualisation that might be useful
So is Mojeek a standalone since it’s yellow? It looks like a lot of other people use them and not the other way around. Yep is cool, but I think they get their money from the sites that pay them? I looked at it yesterday, it’s sort of a strange set up that I’m not sure I understand.
yes we are indeed a standalone, the sizes of bubbles are reflections of the number of index-usage relationships yep is attached to ahrefs: https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/03/yep-search-engine/ where I can speak to where results come from, I couldn’t tell you about their model
Mojeek gives good results, I’ll keep trying it. I’m not sure about yep though, how do the people get paid? I didn’t see any sign up. It sounds like it’s a platform for their SEO subscribers.
If you have spare hardware lying around and a public IP (or a server anyway), you can selfhost SearXNG.
If you’re fine with paying 12$/month (with tax) for a customizable search engine, very accurate and transparently sourced/quoted LLM, and just a better index than any other search engine I know, use Kagi. I heard some rumors and bad things, but nothing to do with privacy, only the aforementioned tax.
And for a free search engine which claims privacy and is an alternative to DDG, with its own index afaik, Brave.
Kagi is anything but private friendly. Their CEO claims only criminals actually want anonymity.
They also think they don’t need pay taxes or to abide by GDPR if they invent their own definitions of the laws.
https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
This is an article often quoted, which makes it seem like it’s a kind of consensus. Yet one of the main points, taxes, can just be disproven by reading the Kagi FAQ about it. Find it by searching “Kagi inc tax” on any search engine, like Kagi itself. Or just https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/sales-tax-vat.html.
And sooo many other things in this article are purely based on assumptions, incorrect data and misquotes. This personal blog is exactly none better than your average hustle-finance-nazi-bro podcast, in almost all terms (except political views).
Misquotes? There are literally screenshots in the article showing full quotes, I don’t know who are you trying to lie to…
And just because Kagi put some text on their website doesn’t make it true.
Taxes don’t work like that (at least not VAT) and you’re a fool for trusting a company which tried to commit a fraud.
Some EU countries do have tax exemptions for small businesses, which Kagi isn’t by any definition.
Anyway, that sure didn’t take long for you to prove Godwin’s law, huh?
I use kagi, it’s very good.
I was gonna try it, but then I saw this: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
The CEO doesn’t understand GDPR, so I’m not inclined to let them handle my data, and even pay them for the privilege.
I can’t justify Kagi’s pricing but I liked it. I’d blow through the cheapest plan in a week. Neeva was pretty good too before they pivoted, also pricey imo though.
I blew through the $5 plan in a short amount of time. I’m a curious person, I guess! I really like it though so decided $120/year was worth it for unlimited.
Compared to DDG (Bing) the search results are really good. When using DDG I would frequently revert to Google, but not with Kagi.
Christ on a bicycle.
I just learnt of searx today, any bad news there?
I’m running a search instance on a VPS so my home IP isn’t linked to my searches. The main disadvantage is that my VPS is in Toronto and I live 2hrs away so geo searches don’t work very well. For instance, if I Google “restaurants” I get results for local restaurants whereas if I Gregle (I named my search engine Gregle) I get results for results near my VPS.
DM me if you want a link to my instance to check it out. It’s open but I don’t publicize it because bad actors could ruin my IP addresses reputation with spam queries via the API.