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
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
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
Why not use Firefox for a privacy browser?
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.
Just a note, the last time I used DDG browser on android while on VPN, the browser had some IP address leak. Not sure whether they fixed it.
I use Firefox almost exclusively on android and have nothing but glowing praise for it, it’s a solid experience
I’m OOTL on DDG donations? What kinds of projects/people do they donate to, and how does that benefit pirates?
I’m srey 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/
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.
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.
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.
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The “Privacy Statement” of Brave Search is somewhat weird tbh. Not clear, Obfuscated.
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https://lemmy.world/post/1510069 :) I am very pleased to tell you Brave is shabby af
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Edit: My comment below was based on a faulty understanding of how EDDM mailers worked and a faulty assumption I based on that ignorance. What they did in reality is little more than sending out spam mail, it was not a privacy violation.
Purely from a privacy standpoint, however, there has never been an indication they have violated users’ trust in that regard.
That’s simply not true though.
They have sent out direct mailers that basically equated to a customer list leak.
In regards to the mailers, they messed up and passed blame,
In this process, our EDDM vendor made a significant mistake by not excluding names, but instead including names before addresses, resulting in the distribution of personalized mailers.
I hope you consider a customer list leak to be a breach of privacy. And seeing how they didn’t take responsibility but tried to pass blame, they didn’t take such a mistake very seriously or respond in a manner that instills further trust.
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I think you may be right actually. When I read this
In this process, our EDDM vendor made a significant mistake by not excluding names, but instead including names before addresses, resulting in the distribution of personalized mailers.
from their statement, I made an assumption because I didn’t look at how EDDM works. The way I read “not excluding names, but instead including names” was: We sent a list of names to the vendor; the vendor was supposed to exclude those names, and mail to everyone else in the ZIP, but instead, they mailed to only those names. It seems that’s not an accurate understanding of the situation. I think the correct reading is: we said “no names” on our EDDM mailers but they acted as if we said “yes names” on our EDDM mailers.
From my original interpretation, that is essentially a customer list leak, or at least a ‘localized’ customer list leak, especially for anyone in a shared living environment where someone else may see the name printed on a Brave mailer and learn that that person is a Brave user.
Thanks for clearing it up though. Let me try to go back and edit a few previous comments where I’ve said this to clarify.
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:
That’s weird, I never had memory leak problems.
I don’t like Whoogle because of their UI for image searches. Imo it’s really bad but that’s just my opinion. The image search is also the reason why I don’t use Brave Search because it redirects you to Google or Bing. What’s the point in being “a privacy respecting search engine” when you get redirected to Google and Bing which are the worst search engines in terms of privacy?
How much RAM is yours using?
None - I deleted it because I don’t use it anymore. It wasn’t much though and it never bloated, even when running for over a whole month.
It wasn’t much though and it never bloated, even when running for over a whole month.
Did you actually check on it, or did you just not notice a problem so you’re stating this? No offense, but you haven’t verified anything, and seem to just be recalling there wasn’t a problem.
I mean, what is “not much,” to you? Because I asked someone else what it was using who also thought it was running well for them, and after only 1 day of uptime it was idle at 350MB of RAM… which is way too high for an idle search engine in my opinion. Another thing, if you were running it in a docker container and had it set to restart=unless-stopped it could have been restarting without you even knowing about it.
No, I didn’t check because it never got so big to the point where it would become suspicious to me that something might be wrong. Maybe it uses more RAM than other self-hosted search engines but it never leaked memory so it used more and more RAM the longer the instance ran. Just because it uses much RAM it doesn’t mean it’s leaking memory. It might just be developed badly, not very caring about your ressources.
Interesting, my instance has been rock solid. When did you give it a try?
It was probably about a year ago now, so I probably should spin it up again. I think I’ll do that today.
How much RAM does yours use?
I’m mobile for the holiday right now, I’m not 100% sure on utilization. But it’s running on a 2 core 4 GB Ubuntu machine along with Caddy and Redis. I also have a Lemmy instance on that same machine so Lemmy, Lemmy-UI, Postgres, and pictr all fit on that machine and work for my daily use.
I can get exact utilization later tonight.
docker stats --no-stream CONTAINER ID NAME CPU % MEM USAGE / LIMIT MEM % NET I/O BLOCK I/O PIDS dd2a774ad1a6 lemmy_lemmy-ui_1 0.00% 42.5MiB / 3.82GiB 1.09% 418kB / 7.24MB 2.65MB / 0B 15 718629b5514f lemmy_lemmy_1 0.03% 6.82MiB / 3.82GiB 0.17% 1.52MB / 1.48MB 864kB / 0B 5 0c944dccc1e1 lemmy_postfix_1 0.00% 4.762MiB / 3.82GiB 0.12% 3.74kB / 0B 0B / 762kB 7 7f939790561c lemmy_postgres_1 0.00% 46.45MiB / 3.82GiB 1.19% 1.09MB / 1.44MB 24.6kB / 2.16MB 9 14c7db5ae7ec lemmy_pictrs_1 0.08% 23.36MiB / 690MiB 3.39% 3.81kB / 0B 0B / 0B 13 3695b8a0b67a caddy 0.00% 9.984MiB / 3.82GiB 0.26% 0B / 0B 34.1MB / 12.3kB 9 12c8bd7c1cdf redis 0.21% 3.555MiB / 3.82GiB 0.09% 101kB / 78.8kB 7.06MB / 0B 5 f03c3298de46 searxng 0.01% 349.9MiB / 3.82GiB 8.94% 9.21MB / 3.82MB 61.4MB / 61.4kB 25I guess it is the largest consumer of memory. Unfortunately I rebooted yesterday, while setting up lemmy I noticed there was a decent amount of OS security updates. Otherwise I probably would have had stats from like 6 months of uptime. I’ll keep an eye on it and see if it balloons.
Yeah, even that, I just don’t understand why a search engine, sitting idle, consumes that much memory. The largest consumers of memory for me are: Omada Controller, Airsonic-Advanced, HomeAssistant, Lidarr, Sonarr, Paperless… all things that process a lot of data, or are written in Java, so it’s to be expected they use more resources.
Then I would see it grow to 600MB+ and occasionally crash, so I just decided to use public instances.
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.
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.
DDG still spies on you. It still better than google, i guess, but i personaly use disroot’s searx
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
Got a link?
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!
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
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.
Has presearch finished their crawler yet? I can’t find recent info about it
Interesting. I’ll have to check these out. Had no idea these existed.
Plus one for Kagi.
It’s pretty decent!
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
For the good balance between privacy and search results i prefer brave over ddg. It gives better results imo. Still use ddg for images
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.
Torproject themself does not recommend changeing settings since it makes you stand out. It is much worse if you are self hosting searx and using it in tor since searx is then linked to you since you are selfhosting it.
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
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
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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.
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!
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!
