Privacy @lemmy.ml

1y ago

Do you think DuckDuckGo is a good choice for people who are concerned about their privacy?

150 comments

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.
  
  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.
- 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
- 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/

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:
https://reclaimthenet.org/startpage-buyout-ad-tech-company
- 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.
- 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!
- 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!
- 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.
- Been using DDG for many years and never new this!
- 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.
  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.
- expired
- 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.

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.
- Use !s for startpage! It's essentially a Google proxy with more privacy.
  
  TIL, thanks!
- 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.

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
- 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.
  
  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.

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 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
- 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
- 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.
- 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.

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:
  https://reclaimthenet.org/startpage-buyout-ad-tech-company
  
  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.
- Yup - tracking and filtering search results; since then I stay away from DDG.

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.

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.
- Interesting. I’ll have to check these out. Had no idea these existed.
- Plus one for Kagi.
  It’s pretty decent!
- Has presearch finished their crawler yet? I can't find recent info about it

DDG still spies on you. It still better than google, i guess, but i personaly use disroot's searx
- Got a link?
- DDG states in their privacy policy they dont store any of your search results and doesnt sell your Data. But yeah searx(ng) is still better

I like DuckDuckGo, but I've been using Brave Search for the AI summarizer feature.
- undefined> Brav
  Brave is impressive, and they use their own index unlike DDG
- They get a lot of info from reddit. Need to start searching Lemmy instead

I ditched it after it dropped the operators like quotes, "OR", "AND", and "-" which hampers it's usefulness to me.

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

I've been using DDG for the last year and pretty happy with it

I use DDG every day as my default search engine across desktop & mobile. It’s good but the search isn’t as always as helpful as Google. If you need to you can just add !g to the search terms and get redirected to Google.

I use an app called TrackerControl on my Android phone, and it caught several trackers on DDG, so I stopped using it. Do I know for certain that the app is absolutely accurate? Nope, but it's a good FOSS that I have been using for a long time and developed a trust relationship with, so I'll avoid what it warns me about. App is available on F-droid if anyone wants to try it.

Hell yeah. I consider myself privacy paranoid and have been using DuckDuckGo for 5 years without any problems so far. It is pretty strict about its privacy policy.

What's wrong with startpage.com?
- Starpage was bought by an advertising company.

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

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:
  https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search

There will always be some compromises and depends on your thread model. While DDG is not perfect, I still use it daily as it's not GOOGLE. I also try other search engine as well like Brave.

AFAIK, most indexes ddg uses come from bing. So it's not really a search engine with its own indexes on its own. I'd suggest using SearX, and if one is willing to sacrifice a bit of privacy over some data and stats gathering, then SearxNG.

Yes, it's good, however you need to be more specific with your query for DDG to return good result.
If you're interested in other privacy respecting search engines, there's Searxng and Kagi (paid).

It may be good for privacy, however, in the past month or so, I have noticed it is incredibly slow to display the search results.
- Mine has been going solid still

They don't allow extensions like Ublock origin. So no.
- Their software is very early and honestly not quite fully baked yet.
  The search engine is great though!

Is DDG’s search results good, better, or about the same as Google or Bing?

Is DDG’s search results good, better, or about the same as Google or Bing?
- DDG is a proxy to Bing AFAIk, their results are pretty much the same. Not bad for English language.

Is DDG’s search results good, better, or about the same as Google or Bing?

It’s better than google, and so it’s a good start.

Its shady for many reasons... I quit using it
I read an article on tor about the problems with many "privacy respecting" search engines, including ddg, here: https://digdeeper.club/articles/search.xhtml

I prefer using DDG or Firefox, however my device I lower end and I find that Brave works best on it.
But I use DDG for my search engine.
- Brave had some dodgy stuff at the start with their crypto weirdness. I think there owner was involved in questionable data practices at his last company. Personally, I would expect someone running a privacy company to have integrity and not compromise on those values in previous ventures.
  
  Brave is a serial scammer that has tried one scheme after another.

Nah, you should avoid it unless you really want to search for a specific image -- search.brave.com respects your privacy and is not compromised.

150 comments