DuckDuckGo I agree

Software
12

Thanks, learned something new!

13

I use DDG as my default and mostly it does the job, but sometimes it gets completely the wrong results and Google understands me better.

Anecdotally I think DDG is suffering from something Google used to be bad at. Returning reviews ahead of technical content. So you search for “broken widget” and you get lots of people reviewing widgets.

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14

I use DDG as the default. I have found recently that I have to go to Google for items.

I’m finding a load of “top 10 x for 2021” results on the DDG recently that’s made it a pain to use so I’ve had to go to Google (which seems to be the same issue as @zkarj has mentioned above). Google is then filled with adverts.

15

I tend to use either DDG in normal mode, or with the !g bang.
And lately switching to www.startpage.com

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16

Qwant apparently doesn’t care for Safari on iOS since it redirects you to a “lite” version and suggests upgrading your browser. What’s weird about that is the same does not happen if you use, say, Chrome in iOS — even though all iOS browsers are built on WebKit. :confused:

17

I find that funny because both DuckDuckGo and Qwant get their search results from Bing.

Seeing Apple launch their own search engine would be great. :grinning:

18

Qwant apparently doesn’t care for Safari on iOS since it redirects you to a “lite” version and suggests upgrading your browser.

Where in the world have you seen this? Just used Qwant as a start page and/or bookmark, no such issues.

(I since switched to Brave anyway because of the extensions and there I have Qwant as a default option.)

19

Saw it this morning on my iPad when I tried the Qwant link from above. It auto-redirected to https://lite.qwant.com.

20

When I go to Qwant.com from Safari on my phone, I get the full experience. I wasn’t even aware of that lite thing until now.

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21

Just tried it from your link and it was fine in Safari. Guess it was a temporary glitch.

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22

this is not great news for DDG users

Screen Shot 2022-05-26 at 4.15.32 pm
Screen Shot 2022-05-26 at 4.15.32 pm1712×1320 170 KB

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23

Just a heads up…Qwant is a French company.

24

This is pretty disappointing. DDG doesn’t seem to value their core principles as much as they’d like us to believe.

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25

They rely on other companies for the bulk of their search results so some compromises are, IMO, inevitable.

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26

My understanding is that this only affects the DDG browser, not the DDG site…

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27

I don’t know. I find it disgusting. Any alternatives ?

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28

Alternatives to DDG? There are several but the only one I’ve tried is startpage.com.
IMO both will surface the obvious results but come up short when you search for more obscure facts. There’s a reason Google is number one.

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29

Out of curiosity, would you be willing to pay for an alternative? I think that’s the only way an alternative will be viable- a large, paid user base.

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30

I had relied on Startpage for a few months. But Startpage is owned by some data mining company. So it’s really hard to trust them. In addition, Startpage frequently serves captcha or just refuses to search.

So far there’s not that much alternatives. Maybe Kagi as a paid service, eTools, or self-hosted searX instances like https://searx.be/.

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31

Here’s the explanation from DDG’s founder. I hesitate to post the clarification because it’s nuanced and people get angry when a news cycle runs hot, but this is making people think the search engine is affected, and that is bad for adoption of private search engines.

This is not about search. To be clear, when you load our search results, you are completely anonymous, including ads. For ads, we actually worked with Microsoft to make ad clicks privacy protected as well. From our public ads page, “Microsoft Advertising does not associate your ad-click behavior with a user profile.” This page is linked to next to every Microsoft ad that is served on our search engine (duckduckgo.com). https://help.duckduckgo.com/company/ads-by-microsoft-on-duck….

In all our browsing apps (iOS/Android/Mac) we also block third-party cookies, including those from Microsoft-owned properties like LinkedIn and Bing. That is, the privacy thing most people talk about on the web (blocking 3rd party cookies) applies here to MSFT. We also have a lot of other web protections that also apply to MSFT-owned properties as well, e.g., GPC, first-party cookie expiration, fingerprinting protection, referrer header trimming, cookie consent handling, fire button data clearing, etc.

This is just about non-DuckDuckGo and non-Microsoft sites in our browsers, where our search syndication agreement currently prevents us from stopping Microsoft-owned scripts from loading, though we can still apply our browser’s protections post-load (like 3rd party cookie blocking and others mentioned above, and do). We’ve also been tirelessly working behind the scenes to change this limited restriction. I also understand this is confusing because it is a search syndication contract that is preventing us from doing a non-search thing. That’s because our product is a bundle of multiple privacy protections, and this is a distribution requirement imposed on us as part of the search syndication agreement. Our syndication agreement also has broad confidentially provisions and the requirement documents themselves are explicitly marked confidential.
[…]
We specifically worked with Microsoft to make our ads privacy protected. When you load them, they are completely anonymous. When you click on them, we got Microsoft to contractually agree and publicly commit (on [the disclosures page] that "Microsoft Advertising does not associate your ad-click behavior with a user profile. It also does not store or share that information other than for accounting purposes.”

7 Likes