Duckduck is just a wrapper for bing (and gives microsoft trackers a free pass)
Startpage is a similar thing that uses google. Considering how hated bing is believe Duck only got more popular because of privacy marketing.
The safest alternative is running your own searxng client, it still relies on bing and google but at least you can verify that its actually stopping all trackers.
I regret not including this as an option now but I contemplated adding this part:
The majority of our (subjective-my) internet nowadays follows patterns of the same places, new places are often found on the old places.
Most of my sites are bookmarked trusted websites. (Increasingly more self hosted also) wikipedia for facts, wolfram alpha for math, sites i have an account on.
Part of the crux is when is the last time you googled in the hope to find a new website you don’t already know yet? Even ads direct you using QR.
I find i rarely need a search engine anymore and when often when i do i can’t find anything anyway. Stuff has gotten so buried under search engine optimisation you are better of using ai for a first responds to obtain the terminology to search for how wrong ai got it then by searching for a question directly.
Duckduck is just a wrapper for bing (and gives microsoft trackers a free pass)
Startpage is a similar thing that uses google. Considering how hated bing is believe Duck only got more popular because of privacy marketing.
The safest alternative is running your own searxng client, it still relies on bing and google but at least you can verify that its actually stopping all trackers.
And the reason DDG is garbage now is because Microsoft raised the price of bing calls.
How about i just wont search.
Honestly though, I barely do. Maybe for work, but I dont think setting up my own will be as helpful.
I regret not including this as an option now but I contemplated adding this part:
The majority of our (subjective-my) internet nowadays follows patterns of the same places, new places are often found on the old places.
Most of my sites are bookmarked trusted websites. (Increasingly more self hosted also) wikipedia for facts, wolfram alpha for math, sites i have an account on.
Part of the crux is when is the last time you googled in the hope to find a new website you don’t already know yet? Even ads direct you using QR.
I find i rarely need a search engine anymore and when often when i do i can’t find anything anyway. Stuff has gotten so buried under search engine optimisation you are better of using ai for a first responds to obtain the terminology to search for how wrong ai got it then by searching for a question directly.
I am hoping to try this thing soon and if its good it might replace 90% of my browser activity. -> https://github.com/glanceapp/glance