• FIST_FILLET@lemmy.ml
    5·
    1 year ago

    NO.

    1. it is US-based
    2. 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

  • Milk@lemmy.sdf.org
    4·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • UprisingVoltage@feddit.it
    2·
    1 year ago

    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

    • CrypticCoffee@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • janonymous@lemmy.world
        0·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • felixculpa@lemm.ee
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • rikonium@discuss.tchncs.de
    1·
    1 year ago

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

  • PlasmaK@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    DDG still spies on you. It still better than google, i guess, but i personaly use disroot’s searx

  • svamp@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • sunflip@monyet.cc
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • dan@lemm.ee
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.