• @FIST_FILLET@lemmy.ml
    26•2 years 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

  • @UprisingVoltage@feddit.it
    11•2 years 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
      4•2 years 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
        1•2 years 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.

        • @CrypticCoffee@lemmy.world
          0•2 years ago

          Firefox for Android is great, and after some initial teething problems, it’s been solid for a long time.

          I remember seeing on reddit a story about a guy who created something and I think suggested DDG stole some of his work and packaged it up as their own. I cannot find it anymore, but remember seeing it at the time and it seemed convincing (even though I was using DDG search and was a fan of their work). I still use them, but not for everything and I remain skeptical. FF is open source, and has been pretty trustworthy for a long time imho.

      • @UprisingVoltage@feddit.it
        0•2 years ago

        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.

    • @bl4kers@lemmy.ml
      2•2 years ago

      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

  • @candle_lighter@lemmy.ml
    10•2 years ago

    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.

    • @JoelJ@lemmy.world
      1•2 years ago

      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!

    • Lunch
      1•2 years ago

      Been using DDG for many years and never new this!

    • @NicoCharrua@lemmy.ca
      0•2 years ago

      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.

  • @PlasmaK@lemmy.ml
    3•2 years ago

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

  • @kixik@lemmy.ml
    3•2 years ago

    AFAIK, most indexes ddg uses come from bing. So it’s not really a search engine with its own indexes on its own. I’d suggest using SearX, and if one is willing to sacrifice a bit of privacy over some data and stats gathering, then SearxNG.

            • 133arc585
              0•2 years ago

              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.

              • @TiffyBelle@lemmy.ml
                2•1 year ago

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                • 133arc585
                  1•2 years ago

                  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.

  • @Sizably8826@lemmy.world
    1•2 years ago

    There will always be some compromises and depends on your thread model. While DDG is not perfect, I still use it daily as it’s not GOOGLE. I also try other search engine as well like Brave.

  • @svamp@lemmy.ml
    1•2 years 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.