Eh, DDG is just as shady as most others. Starting with their contract with MS.
Basing their browser off of chromium (or Edge and “underlying OS technology” or however they phrased it) just helps to further the Google monopoly.
“DuckDuckGo uses clear gifs from the domain improving.duckduckgo.com. This is a tracking technique and can be used to collect analytics about your web browser. Whenever you use DuckDuckGo, several requests will be sent to this domain.[4] This is of course not the kind of behavior that you would expect from a privacy concerned website, but there it is. Do you trust DuckDuckGo to collect “anonymous” analytics about you?”
-- From: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/duckduckgo
Not that I view that quote as fact of any sort, but something to look into before jumping on the bandwagon so to speak.
Then of course there’s also DDG’s CEO, Gabriel Weinberg.
“Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, used to run the Names Database.[1] This was a website that aimed to connect people who had lost contact by gathering lots and lots of e-mail addresses. Getting access could be done by either paying money, or submitting lots of e-mail addresses of other people. Since the service revolved around gathering personal information, it is very suspicious for Gabriel Weinberg to start a business that is privacy-oriented.”
From: https://archive.is/20150624075735/https://8ch.net/tech/ddg.html and https://archive.is/N2qe8
So the real advice as to what browser to use? Use whatever one you want that has the features you like and enjoy. Anything else is a gamble in terms of support, security, compatibility, and usability.
So wait… when you visit DDG… DDG gets GIFs from… DDG… to track you? You do realize ANY website you go to collects basic information about your browser and connection info, regardless of how “private”, right? Love how you got this from a shady looking site that looks straight out of 1997.
And oh no, someone did something else in the past. People can change and do different things, you know.
DDG is about as secure and privacy-focused as we’re going to get, and people still bitch and complain about it.
DDG was also caught downranking search results or censoring them. Regardless of what is being censored I don’t think it should be up to the company to decide for individuals. It should be the individual who does their own due diligence and decides for themselves what they want to believe.
Yep, I’ve had issues searching for some things on Google before where I could tell Google was adding a political leaning bias, censoring things, or just deranking certain content heavily. So I thought DDG would be a good one to try out with the same searches but I still found it had similar issues. I brought out Yandex and was easily able to find the results I was looking for on the top results.
Now I am sure Yandex also censors stuff too, but its definitely my go to if I’m trying to find things on certain political topics from views Google disagrees with, or for finding things related to piracy.
Honestly getting a bit sad how not even something as generic as a search engine can be free from political censorship.
I haven’t used Google in a while. I have been using Brave Search and it has been good. They don’t rely on any of the big search engines anymore either. They have been building their own index. Right now they only rely on Google and Bing search for image search.
Try out searxng! It aggregates from multiple sesrch engines.
I find that, with companies that roll their own search algorithm that the results are often… lacking. I also don’t trust brave as they try to push their crypto on you.
For what its worth, on the browser side of tbings, I run firefox w/ arkenfox
improving.duckduckgo.com is not something they try to hide, you can easily disable it in your search engine settings. DDG was launched in 2008 and has a pretty solid track record - I think we can forgive the Names DB thing at this point.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
Eh, DDG is just as shady as most others. Starting with their contract with MS.
Basing their browser off of chromium (or Edge and “underlying OS technology” or however they phrased it) just helps to further the Google monopoly.
Not that I view that quote as fact of any sort, but something to look into before jumping on the bandwagon so to speak.
Then of course there’s also DDG’s CEO, Gabriel Weinberg.
So the real advice as to what browser to use? Use whatever one you want that has the features you like and enjoy. Anything else is a gamble in terms of support, security, compatibility, and usability.
So wait… when you visit DDG… DDG gets GIFs from… DDG… to track you? You do realize ANY website you go to collects basic information about your browser and connection info, regardless of how “private”, right? Love how you got this from a shady looking site that looks straight out of 1997.
And oh no, someone did something else in the past. People can change and do different things, you know.
DDG is about as secure and privacy-focused as we’re going to get, and people still bitch and complain about it.
Pathetic.
You do realize looking straight out of 1997 is basically the point of neocities.org right?
DDG was also caught downranking search results or censoring them. Regardless of what is being censored I don’t think it should be up to the company to decide for individuals. It should be the individual who does their own due diligence and decides for themselves what they want to believe.
Here is the article.
I’m glad that I recently migrated to SearXNG!
Yep, I’ve had issues searching for some things on Google before where I could tell Google was adding a political leaning bias, censoring things, or just deranking certain content heavily. So I thought DDG would be a good one to try out with the same searches but I still found it had similar issues. I brought out Yandex and was easily able to find the results I was looking for on the top results.
Now I am sure Yandex also censors stuff too, but its definitely my go to if I’m trying to find things on certain political topics from views Google disagrees with, or for finding things related to piracy.
Honestly getting a bit sad how not even something as generic as a search engine can be free from political censorship.
I haven’t used Google in a while. I have been using Brave Search and it has been good. They don’t rely on any of the big search engines anymore either. They have been building their own index. Right now they only rely on Google and Bing search for image search.
Thanks for that info, totally forgot Brave had a search. Maybe I’ll start making use of them then!
Try out searxng! It aggregates from multiple sesrch engines.
I find that, with companies that roll their own search algorithm that the results are often… lacking. I also don’t trust brave as they try to push their crypto on you.
For what its worth, on the browser side of tbings, I run firefox w/ arkenfox
improving.duckduckgo.com is not something they try to hide, you can easily disable it in your search engine settings. DDG was launched in 2008 and has a pretty solid track record - I think we can forgive the Names DB thing at this point.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I love when fellow seafarers go through this kind of effort. 🙏