this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Technology

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Privacy-focused alternatives to duckduckgo (ddg)? (beehaw.org)
submitted 2 years ago by bermuda@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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I've been using DuckDuckGo for a few months now and to be honest I'm kind of disappointed. I really appreciate the privacy concerns and the lack of tracking software. It got really annoying how Google would "recommend" things that it thought I was interested in when I wasn't interested in them, that kind of thing. But on the other hand, I've been starting to get really frustrated at just how hard it is to search for anything. You have to be really specific, especially if it's something niche or if you don't fully know the right terms to ask for. At least with Google, if you weren't completely correct about a topic, it could at least parse what hobby or activity you were trying to ask about and bring up things related to that. But with DDG, I've found it doesn't even really try in that regard. Plus it's frankly really dumb how it uses Apple Maps as opposed to, I dunno? OSM? I honestly prefer Google Maps despite my dislike of the search engine so the usage of Apple Maps is really offputting.

Now, before you say anything, going in I knew it wouldn't be as easy to search for things as on Google, but I'm pretty experienced with the internet and I didn't think it would be a problem. But even being hyper-specific yields surprisingly little results if it's something niche. Even wording it like you would on a University library search engine doesn't seem to work as good as I might expect.

I'm open to considering more mainstream options too like Bing if it's better than I remember it being.

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[–] Lowbird@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I get what you mean, though on the other hand, a company that bills itself as privacy focused and is funded by user payments is (most likely) serving the users with search as the product, and not harvesting minute data from the users in order to serve advertizers with users as the product. Maybe they have your name and credit card, but don't track and retain anything else? I wouldn't assume that and would read through their actual terms - I think this could go either way - but I wouldn't write the whole thing off automatically either.

Edit: could be it's not unlike paying a VPN/privacy focused email provider like Proton, which supposedly has your payment info (for premium/pro) but not the content of your emails, etc.