DuckDuckGo search engine – The privacy browser is growing rapidly • Hacker News Board

Re: DuckDuckGo search engine – The privacy browser is growing rapidly

#41

Post by Shadonototro » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 7:13 PM UTC

Qluxzz wrote: post #39

Shadonototro wrote: post #38

It is not a privacy browser, they track you It's proprietary They refused independent source audit Their android app was leaking your browsing history to their servers: https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/527 They are operated from the USA, so government (CIA/FBI) has all the data they want, whenever they want

Are there any better alternatives than DDG, or is it just the lesser evil of the two?

Stop thinking random american services will solve your problem

That is not how internet works

Work on hidding/spoofing your identity, and use what everyone uses, you better hidden if you are one of the billions of users than one of the thousands

Re: DuckDuckGo search engine – The privacy browser is growing rapidly

#42

Post by SecurityLagoon » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 7:27 PM UTC

da_big_ghey wrote: post #16

aminozuur wrote: post #9

Unpopular to say but extremely popular to do: I'm happy to sacrifice some of my data, in order to get top notch search results.

The thing that finally drove me off google wasn't data privacy, but how terrible it got in the past few weeks alone. It's started serving me crazy numbers of captchas whenever I'm on my VPN (personal server that I run), one after almost every query. I normally go through them with Buster, but after doing that maybe twice in a few minutes, it forces me to do the visual one. Add to that how much google search results a…

Yeah Google is unusable over a VPN. The amount of captchas is crazy. Even on corporate connections with cookies blocked it can get antsy because it can't track you well enough.

Re: DuckDuckGo search engine – The privacy browser is growing rapidly

#43

Post by SecurityLagoon » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 7:35 PM UTC

jjcon wrote: post #4

Does anyone have any tips for using ddg? I feel like maybe I’m just not conditioned to how it thinks cause I seem to have terrible luck with my search relevance. People here seem to love it and I would love to switch over from google but I just can’t get the knack.

The thing I think people usually forget is that because it doesn't track you it doesn't have a lot of the context that google infers. For example when you are searching for restaraunts you will probably need to add your city or town as a search term to get relevant results.

Re: DuckDuckGo search engine – The privacy browser is growing rapidly

#44

Post by croutonwagon » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 7:58 PM UTC

aminozuur wrote: post #19

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny thing there is that the quality of Google Search results have absolutely dropped off a cliff for me in the last two years. I'm finding frequently that duckduckgo provides more relevant results with a better UI and faster loading times.

That could be so, I'm willing to give DDG another try. But I use google for stock information, flight updates, to calculate "what date is it 18 days after July 13", and many other weird questions that Google answers instantaneously. Google's gotten so good with all that, that they've got me by the balls.

For me. I just pipe it to DDg.

If, for any reason, I want google. I just append !g to the search.

For example I prefer google when searching restaurants or brick and mortar places with a phone number. dDDG piggy backs on Yelp which isn’t great sometimes and out of date. So I just revert to piping it to google.

Interestingly IT/devops/languange related searches have marketdly improved with DDg and I can get consistent results (ie using the same search string later). Google will often give me random garbage from places that are regularly unhelpful like Microsoft’s answers pages etc.

Re: DuckDuckGo search engine – The privacy browser is growing rapidly

#45

Post by joshspankit » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #14

aminozuur wrote: post #9

Unpopular to say but extremely popular to do: I'm happy to sacrifice some of my data, in order to get top notch search results.

Funny thing there is that the quality of Google Search results have absolutely dropped off a cliff for me in the last two years. I'm finding frequently that duckduckgo provides more relevant results with a better UI and faster loading times.

Same here. The “SEO” space is way too aggressive, and while Google does a pretty good battling it in general, the searches that are not top-level mainstream consistently have a lot of noise.