A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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I’ve been using DDG as my default search as it works with ExpressVPN, Google often requires captcha or sign in.
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.
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?
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.
I ditched it after it dropped the operators like quotes, “OR”, “AND”, and “-” which hampers it’s usefulness to me.
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.
NO.
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!
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It is US based LOL!!!
NO.
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.
Plus one for Kagi.
It’s pretty decent!
Interesting. I’ll have to check these out. Had no idea these existed.
Has presearch finished their crawler yet? I can’t find recent info about it
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
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
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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.
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This comment is worded very optimistic. There are plenty of ways to leak your identity using tor. Or any other tech for that matter.
For the good balance between privacy and search results i prefer brave over ddg. It gives better results imo. Still use ddg for images
Yeah Brave search is great imo. They need to add image search now.
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
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
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.
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!
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.
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/92181/youtube-to-disable-video-playback-for-accounts-caught-too-many-times-with-ad-blockers/index.html
Then competitors will have to move away from Google’s evil empire making life better for everyone.
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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!
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