We changed the URL from https://duckduckgo.com/app to the page that explains what that app does.
Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)
111–120 of 182 posts
Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)
#112[deleted]
Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)
#113I've stopped using Google and moved to DDG not because of privacy, but because the results on Google just seem the same everytime even when I use different wording, making it feel like Google has been becoming a "recommendation engine" rather than a "search engine".
If you feel like Google is excluding certain keywords you very much like to include, you can wrap the word/sentence in double quotes, this tells Google to show results that certainly include these keywords. For example, searching: "word x" "sentence a" would prompt Google to show only pages that include both the word and the sentence in the same page.
If only. It's a bit more fuzzy than that now.
Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)
#114I love DDG (and have been using it as my primary search engine for about six months) but I feel like the hacker community (including me) forgets that DDG is a for-profit corporation, and that at some level posting these kinds of links is more or less the same as just giving them free advertising.
DuckDuckGo's product is search without privacy violations. I'm actually pretty delighted someone is demonstrating that this is a profitable product.
Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)
#115Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience has been the opposite. I tried switching to Brave and DuckDuckGo over the last six months, but found myself opening google and re-running the search so often that I recently gave up, and, with misgivings, reset my browser and search preferences back to google. Duckduckgo just never found what I was looking for, and, in broader searches, would return relatively fewer results.
I went through the same process, until I realized that Google’s results aren’t better for me because I evolved. What Google does is to have context and to use that context to make the queries more specific. They use for example your location and your history of searches. However being privacy conscious, I deleted my Google history and disabled the collecting of history in my Google account. And then the results becam…
I understand the point being made, but it's arguably irrelevant why Duckduckgo's results are lower in quality - the switch still involves the loss of not insignificant utility, which goes against the experiences I'm reading here from all the people here saying how great their search results were.
Moreover, I'm not convinced it's entirely due to my search history, location or other online history. It's definitely not search skills, or inspecificity of search terms that's the problem.
IMHO, it's mostly poor coverage. In my casual experience, it's particularly evident in academic journal articles, but there's definitely poorer coverage in general. Even when I know the web page I'm looking for, I can't get it to show up in the search. Or, as I mentioned, a blanket search will bring up a page or so of relevant links, compared to many pages from google.
The elephant in the room here is Bing. Bing is an objectively worse search. There's no way around that, and no ideological dressing that can change the fact.
Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)
#117Switched 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!!
> Go, OpenStreetMap!! Didn’t DuckDuckGo switch off of OpenStreetMap to Apple Maps recently?
Correct. I wish they stuck it out with OSM, that project needs more support.
Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)
#118Missing features I wish DuckDuckGo had (and reasons why I manually type google.com even though I have DDG set as my default browser: - sports searches. If I search for “Washington Capitals”, I want to know when they’re playing next and what channel it’s on, as well as the results of their past game. This goes for any time I search for a sports team. - searches for dictionary terms should one-box the definition (for i…
If you're willing, consider using the 'Send Feedback' link in the lower right corner of the DDG results page to inform them when you were 'reaching' for a given helper-box and didn't get what you were hoping for.
Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)
#119I first tried DDG in its early years and it just didn't yield the results I needed, I tried it again a couple of years ago and have stuck with it ever since as it has must better results these days.
Same, at the start I regularly dropped back to Google if I couldn't find what I was looking for, the last few times I tried that the Google results were even less helpful than the DDG ones. Maybe my Google-fu is just rusty, though.
Re: Use DuckDuckGo to improve your privacy online (2018)
#120If the user submits a GET request to DDG from the commandline with Javascript disabled, then all results links are prefixed with the address of a DDG server, e.g., https://example.com becomes https://duckduckgo.com/l/uddg=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com
Whatever the reasons may be for this decision, it allows DDG to track all links that the user follows from the results page. That is no better than Google. It is not a privacy improvement in that regard.
If the user submits the request via POST, then the results are not prefixed. For example, if the request is submitted from an html form with method set to "post".
I submit that allowing users to GET (clean) results without using Javascript would be a privacy improvement over Google. Not to mention that it would please many users who get frustrated when trying to copy links from a Google results page only to find they have been prefixed and loaded with Google url parameters.
Users deserve clean result links.
To see the difference between prefixed and non-prefixed result links:
curl -o a.htm https://duckduckgo.com/lite/?q=example.com
grep -m1 .=result-link a.htm
curl -o b.htm -d "q=example.com" https://duckduckgo.com/lite/
grep -m1 .=result-link b.htm