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Totally agree. Had a similar experience as well and then tried again a few months ago and am happy. I do still need to jump over to Le Goog for some searches though. The UI supports a good amount of tweaking which was helpful for getting me used to the switch too
!g search term
I'm glad most a lot of these comments are saying DDG works for them; I still have a lot of issues with the search quality and switched to Startpage a while ago which uses anonymized google results.
I'm with you. I switched to DDG, and within a day i started subconsciously adding `!g` to my query. And it's for simple things, not even complicated programming queries. For example, if i wanna see what the weather is, typing "Toronto weather" in google gives me the current weather right on the front page, whereas with DDG, i have to scan for weather network and click on it to actually get the information. Same goes…
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The ddg CEO (and others) have answered this question here: https://www.quora.com/How-does-DuckDuckGo-make-money tl;dr: They serve ads based on keywords and not by tracking your interests.
So how does this fit into it?
It's possible to serve ads without being creepy if that's what you're asking.
If you're looking for privacy, you shouldn't use DDG as it's based in the US. Consider searx or startpage instead
Why would I use another AMERICAN / Western search engine? I personally feel we would be better off using Yandex (Russian) or Baidu (Chinese) search engines. We need more COMPETITION to reduce our reliance on parasites like Google / Microsoft / FB etc and thus force the industry to reevaluate their business model on how they make money from us. Yandex has a pretty decent search engine, and also helpfully provides a li…
Two reasons:
1. The US is a functional democracy, with a bill of rights and privacy laws which aren’t perfect, but exist; California even has its own version of the GDPR
2. They have strong trade agreements with the EU and if you’re an EU citizen this matters, as companies found to violate the GDPR will get screwed; GDPR which also makes the export of data very complicated, so US companies are increasingly keeping EU data on EU servers
Speaking as an EU citizen, the NSA is not my enemy. But companies like Facebook are. So for me a company like DuckDuckGo is still acceptable because without privacy, they offer nothing of interest, so they won’t do anything to jeopardize their reputation.
Speaking of which, DuckDuckGo can exist in the US, but not in China or in Russia, both being jurisdictions that are ... challenging, to say the least.
If you insist on not using US services, then the only alternatives worth looking at are in Europe, because we have strong privacy laws and we aren’t being led by dictators. And you’d better not look at a “five eyes country” ;-)
Here’s one: https://www.qwant.com/
Startpage.com is better and has better privacy and search results
Why is this suddenly on the front page?
Switched to DDG for my defaults over a year ago now. Still occasionally have to append a !g to my search, and Google Maps is still unmatched, but for run of the mill searches it's been working out. Google lost my trust, so if I can avoid using a service of theirs with a viable alternative, I do so. Go, OpenStreetMap!!