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

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

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.
- 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.
- 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.

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.

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!

It's my main search in my browser, so I don't even type it. Would strongly recommend.
Been using DDG for many years and never new this!
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.

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.

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

What's wrong with startpage.com?

Starpage was bought by an advertising company.

The "Privacy Statement" of Brave Search is somewhat weird tbh. Not clear, Obfuscated.

Check out Mull browser. There's mobile version as well for desktops. Its lightweight Firefox without any of the telemetry.

And for people who need chromium, there's mulch, a hardened chromium fork with some security patches from vanadium
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.

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?

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.

expired

I like DuckDuckGo, but I've been using Brave Search for the AI summarizer feature.

They get a lot of info from reddit. Need to start searching Lemmy instead

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

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.

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

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.

Isn't DDG essentially a front end to Bing?

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.

It's better than google but It's not good. Only options is self hosted searxng

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.

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.
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
Yup - tracking and filtering search results; since then I stay away from DDG.

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.

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

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.

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