There’s a fair bit of skepticism about DDG in here, and I’ve heard it before, but I feel like a lot of people are being pretty unfair to them. Are there search engines that don’t ultimately use Google or Bing? Yes, there are. Are they good? It depends on what you mean by that.
It takes enormous resources to index even “most” of the internet on a rapid, ongoing basis. This is the main reason why Google and Bing overall provide the most thorough results. The only independent search engine I would trust is perhaps Neeva, because it’s subscription-based. An engine claiming to be as thorough as Bing or Google that doesn’t take money directly from you is up to something.
A lot of what DDG is trying to do with its browser and search-ancillary features is find some way of making money because they have to pay Microsoft for Bing results.
It’s worth thinking about what our expectations are for search engines. If they must be free, but also not ad-supported and data-gathering… How can they afford to exist?
from the article “utilizes the Blink rendering engine”
when googled you find “Blink is the name of the rendering engine used by Chromium”
so edge rendering engine? not looking like it.
Edge is also Chromium now, so this is technically correct lol. There are literally three browsers in existence right now: Firefox, Safari, and then the 100 faces of Chromium
I’ve been doing a lot of reading about DDG since this dropped and ad blocking, a major privacy factor, was not included, and simply, I don’t trust DDG anymore. If they were willing to disregard user privacy once, chances are they’ll do it again. Hell, I’d bet they already are.
I think Duck Duck Go has been doomed to be subservient to Microsoft’s whims ever since Google blocked them from aggregating search results from Google’s index. Now the only way to run a private search engine is to use a private index like Xng or Metager. Of those, I’d rexommens Xng
I’ve had a private SearXNG instance for about a year. Never going back, if you want no ads and to not be tracked by your searches it’s the way to go. I host it on a cloud server to further remove myself from being tracked via IP. It’s pretty easy to spin one up and I highly recommend it.
How do you feel about paid search like Kagi? I’ve been using it and think it’s great. No tracking, apparently.
I haven’t even heard of it so I don’t have an opinion on it. If it works for you then great! Technically my private searxng is a paid service since I host it in the cloud but it does have the option to be free if you host it locally.
I’ll also add, with a private instance of searxng you know for a fact nothing is getting saved.
Great qualities, I’ll give it a try thank you!
I pay $5 a month to host my own instance of SearXNG on a 1GB Linode server. I am in full control of the server and the source code running it since it’s completely open software. I don’t have to trust that Kagi is being honest and fear that one day it comes out that they did something stupid like leak my billing address or sell my data through some convoluted legalese change to their terms of service.
Additionally I get access to search results from Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo, and any other provider I want, all without having anything about me or my activity tied to some kind of centralized identity/payment.
I like the sound of it! Kagi is working well for me, but will consider trying this out very soon.
