So ddg is down, so I visit Google. It’s been some years.
I just can’t believe how poor it’s results are, and how it’s trying to suggest things it think I might also want (and failing miserably).
I just assumed ddg would be the lesser, but I use it for privacy. Turns out I’m wrong.
How long has Google been this bad?
I just assumed ddg would be the lesser, but I use it for privacy. Turns out I’m wrong.
If you’re using DDG for privacy, then indeed you are wrong.
It may be “less invasive” than google, but it’s neither anonymous, nor private.
Here’s a bunch more reasons from techrights.org, a site dedicated to digital freedom and exposing corruption.
Direct privacy abuse:
DDG was caught violating its own privacy policy by issuing tracker cookies.
DDG’s app sends every URL you visit to DDG servers. (reaction).
DDG is currently collecting users’ operating systems and everything they highlight in the search results. (to verify this, simply hit F12 in your browser and select the “network” tab. Do a search with javascript enabled. Highlight some text on the screen. Mouseover the traffic rows and see that your highlighted text, operating system, and other details relating to geolocation are sent to DDG. Then change the query and submit. Notice that the previous query is being transmitted with the new query to link the queries together)
DDG is accused of fingerprinting users’ browsers.
When clicking an ad on the DDG results page, all data available in your session is sent to the advertiser, which is why the Epic browser project refuses to set DDG as the default browser.
DDG blacklisted Framabee, a search engine for the highly respected framasoft.org consortium."
CloudFlare:
DDG promotes one of the largest privacy abusing tech giants and adversary to the Tor community: CloudFlare Inc. DDG results give high rankings to CloudFlare sites, which consequently compromises privacy, net neutrality, and anonymity.
Full article: http://techrights.org/2020/07/02/ddg-privacy-abuser-in-disguise/
ETA: The bulk of the text in my reply was lifted from a reddit comment. I tried to format my comment to reflect that it’s a “quote”, alas I’ve failed. Hence this.
Also, I don’t have a card in this game. I understand anonymity and privacy - I dislike intentional deception.
What to use them, if not DDG
I’m currently using searx.be with good results
Searx improved a lot since I last used it. Was really slow before
How can I set it as default browser on Android Brave?
Not able to do it
Sorry, but I don’t know how to do that. I use Cromite, not Brave.
I use kagi, it’s very good.
I can’t justify Kagi’s pricing but I liked it. I’d blow through the cheapest plan in a week. Neeva was pretty good too before they pivoted, also pricey imo though.
Christ on a bicycle.
I just learnt of searx today, any bad news there?
I recently learned about it, but haven’t used it. From what I understand, it’s similar to how the fediverse works; individual instances are run by whoever wants to run them. If you run your own instance, you have complete trust in it, but you effectively aren’t anonymous (unless you support a whole bunch of users to pool together. If you join someone else’s instance, you have to trust them. There’s public and private instances.
The other downside is that, like many other small players, they are a metasearch engine, so they rely on the big players like Google and Bing who actually crawl the web for information to index. If Google or Bing want to hide information, that trickles down into metasearch engines, too. It’s somewhat buffered by thr fact that your metasearch can look through a whole bunch of different indexes, so you aren’t held to one countries censorship, but it probably still has an effect.
Excellent reply. Thank you. Do you have any suggestions for alternatives?
Also as DDG is based in the US it is most likely legally bound to give your informations to any agency with a nice gag order on top of it.
I can’t imagine any serious privacy oriented business to be headquartered in the US.
The whole better privacy is true with DDG but certainly not to the extent people would like to think.
That being said DDG has decent search results and is slightly better than Google for privacy. Google is an ecosystem so every little bit you don’t give them is a success.
It’s really too bad we don’t have good private search engines…
Excellent reply. Thank you. Do you have any suggestions for alternatives?
They also do ranked search like google, although not as bad but i think that is just a factor of age. Actual search term is often 5th or more down page
For many years now, almost the only way to find tech-related answers was to add the word “reddit” to your search. Before the Rexodus ofc.
Nowadays a lot of people go straight to where they wanted to find info - Wikipedia, StackOverflow, IMDB, etc. - and search from there.
Google itself has admitted how bad it has gotten, and in response they decided to voluntarily reduce their profits and return everything back to when it all worked… - no I’m just kidding, they said wait a bit and AI will save us all, somehow (from ourselves?).
I just can’t believe how poor it’s results are
Interesting, as the incredibly poor results are why I am still not using DDG. It’s like a worse Bing, and Bing is already terrible.
You are btw correct that Google results have gotten worse. There were studies run that confirmed this. The very same studies found that Bing (and by extension ~all third-party engines) have also gotten worse, and faster so than Google. In other words, search as a whole has gone to shit, which anecdotally matches up with my repeated attempts to swap to DDG every 6-12 months that just result in learning to add
!gto every single search, so I might as well skip doing that.Your take matches my experience perfectly. I always am baffled when people say Google is worse than ddg. I always wanted to use ddg instead, but try as I might, on a literal daily basis, at least 30% ddg results are trash and I have to switch to Google to find whatever I am looking for
I’m pretty sure it’s just trendy to call Google search shit, and to criticise the top product. I’m also pretty sure DDG is just uses Bing search under the hood (plus it’s privacy features), so I always thought these complaints were quite funny. The ads on Google are probably the most aggressive though, which IMO is the worst part.
I’ve found Google alternatives great for things that are… filtered (copyright etc), but honestly no matter what search engine I use, I swear none just give you the results for your query anymore. I’ve still been finding the Bing-based ones horrible quality for relevancy and defaulting to Google.
It started when Search Engine Optimisation became a thing, so it’s been a while. But it really went downhill a few years ago.
Don’t think any engine is immune to SEO
Google has been this bad since their initial IPO, when they signalled their intent to do this, and should have been stopped to protect the most useful public utility ever invented. Since that day they’ve been a pimp; the decision to become a pimp led to this.
“Do no evil”
I’ve been trying to get used to DDG recently and while I’ve definitely noticed the decline of Google, that decline has been subtle for me, it hasn’t become a disaster, it’s just generally frustrating and just not as good as it used to be. But that said, I haven’t exactly loved DDG in comparison. It’s okay, definitely works, recent outage excepted, but I often found the results kind of needed more work to make use of, they were more kind of, on the topic of what I asked for rather than specifically what I asked within the domain of that topic. It’s more like using a search engine as one would have done some 15 or so years ago. Often if trying to find something out I’d be disappointed by the non specific or irrelevant results and get suspicious and try changing back to google for the same thing and found that though they largely contained the same results, Google would have one or two that DDG didn’t which were closer to the top of the results and were more specifically about my precise query than just the general topic. I think these tend to be things like forum posts where, if my query is a question, someone’s asked basically that exact or very similar question.
I think DDG is mostly working ok enough for me that I’ll persevere but I can’t say it’s been better.
I found that switch DDG to my default was good enough for ~80% of my searches. I’ll only use Google as an alternative for shopping since that’s where DDG legitimately just sucks at providing anything that’s not “temu” or alibaba.
I noticed it getting worse over the years. I switched to SearXNG last year when I felt Google was getting really ridiculous.
They started censoring a lot at some point, maybe because they had to, but that’s not the only reason.
Hahaha, I ~just came after a search using g**gle due to ddgo being down, I noticed the “web” search is no longer the default (as it was discussed some days ago here).
Google seems to have a huge grip on people and they don’t seem to notice (or act against) the terrible services of google search…
I think it’s been years now. At least a couple of years, I was baffled too back in the day.
I went to StartPage personally.
That’s just a proxy for google. Same terrible results.
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I use Swiss Cow and it works fine https://swisscows.com
You have infinitely other options. search.brave.com, yandex, bing. And probably a lot of cool ones I don’t know about.
All of them search more accurately your directly requested phrase instead of a blurry interpretation of your sentiment.
