BlackWinnerYoshi wrote on February 19, 2021 at 6:28 PM

Reply to comment by Wahaha in Awesome Privacy: A curated list of tools and services that respect your privacy by RandomlyGeneratedUsername

TL;DR: DDG is fine for regular usage, some of its issues can be solved by using uBlock Origin.

Sure, DuckDuckGo is suspicious, but it's also a search engine that has somewhat decent results, unlike Mojeek and Wiby.me, and that's sad.

About those two issues above, tracking could be disabled if you have uBlock Origin (which you should), and ads can be disabled in settings (or with uBlock Origin, again).

And about those three other issues, well, it does suck that Gabriel Weinberg ran Names Database, and it does suck that DuckDuckGo had a tracking cookie, which I'm not sure if uBlock Origin blocked. However, I don't think it matters that DDG is in USA. I mean, just read this: https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ghost/email.html#laws

Wahaha wrote on February 19, 2021 at 7:50 PM

If you put effort in you can also make Chrome privacy friendly (ungoogled-chromium), but I thought the point of this list should be to find stuff you don't have to expend such effort.

Searx has pretty good results.

Also, these things are just what leaked about DDG. Who knows what else there is we don't know about.

RandomlyGeneratedUsername OP wrote on February 19, 2021 at 8:31 PM (edited on February 19, 2021 at 9:14 PM)

Searx has multiple engines. If you're lucky enough, you can even get Google results. It must be Google bans Searx instances quickly because of heavy traffic or automated requests.

BlackWinnerYoshi wrote on February 22, 2021 at 1:23 PM

TL;DR: it takes little effort to use ungoogled-chromium, searX has average results, DDG might be hiding something.

I don't think you need to put any effort to use ungoogled-chromium - it's literally just a drop-in replacement for Goolag Hrom and Chromium.

Actually, never mind, you do need to put a bit of additional effort if you want to install more add-ons than you had before when transfering your user data from Hrom to ungoogled-chromium. But it's not a lot, really: https://github.com/NeverDecaf/chromium-web-store

And about searX having good results... no, I don't think so. I think searX results are average because

search engines block searX instances,
even if they're not blocked, the results are weak, even when you choose big providers/violators such as Google, Bing, Yahoo,
even if the results are not weak, they are mixed in weird ways, such as a full page with only one search engine.

I think the third problem is especially serious because searX has (or at least used to have) a bug where the results don't go beyond the first page. Of course, it depends on the instance you use, settings, and time of usage, but still.

And yeah, we might not know everything about DDG, but unless it turns out DuckDuckGo has been bought by Macroshaft (or some other big corpo), I'll continue using it. And if that thing happens, I'll just privately host a searX instance because both Mojeek and Wiby.me suck, unfortunately.

Wahaha wrote on February 22, 2021 at 3:40 PM

The effort was creating ungoogled-chromium. I'm on a semi-private searx instance that works well, mostly.

I guess I'd rather use Bing than DDG. At least Microsoft doesn't earn money by selling my information, as far as I know.

BlackWinnerYoshi wrote on February 22, 2021 at 6:15 PM

TL;DR: yes, ungoogled-chromium was a pain to create, but IDK why would you use Bing/Yahoo directly instead of using DuckDuckGo as a middleman.

Ah, creating ungoogled-chromium. It was a pain, and while Eloston (I guess that's their name?) is a nice and skilled guy, the Chromium codebase is massive, so I feel like this might not be long until ungoogled-chromium dies, and that's sad because I won't really have any good web browser choices:

GNU IceCat - it's freetardist, so no Flash Player, and there's the annoying LibreJS add-on. Also, it still suffers from Firefox's BS, like the bad UI, slow speed, barely any configuration, depreciated XUL add-ons, etc.
Pale Moon - has an add-on blocklist, enables WebAssembly by default, has spyware by default, etc.
Otter Browser - uses QtWebEngine, which is controlled by Goolag, and it doesn't support add-ons

I think the only good browser is Web Browser, but, well, it turns out the compiling process for Windoze (which I might be still forced to use) has been removed, so that's a problem.

Also, why would you use Bing directly instead of through a proxy like DuckDuckGo? (I mean, it could fit into the definition of a proxy server - a server that is a middleman between the user and the other server) Or Yahoo, for that matter, since both are used when searching with DuckDuckGo? In this case, I would rather proxy than to directly give data to some big corpo, but okay.

Wahaha wrote on February 22, 2021 at 6:22 PM

Flash died at the beginning of 2021. Unless you put lots of effort in, it won't work in any browser anymore.

I trust Microsoft more than I trust DDG, which is why I have no problem using Bing directly. And the reason I trust Microsoft is because I understand how they make money. I don't use Bing, I use searx. But I'd use Bing over DDG.

BlackWinnerYoshi wrote on February 22, 2021 at 8:43 PM

I actually don't think you need to put a lot of effort in order to make Flash usable in a browser. Just get Adobe Flash 32.0.0.363 from Internet Archive (clear net only) and Basilisk Browser (clear net only). Sure, Adobe made Flash dead since 12 January 2021, Mozilla will fully kill Flash after 7 September 2021, Google made Flash dead since 19 January 2021, Microsoft released a Flash-killing update on 18 February 2021, Apple was the earliest to kill Flash on 16 September 2020, so using Flash has been made more difficult, but it's still not impossible!

And actually, if you know how Microsoft earns money, then I guess it's fine?