To me personally duckduckgo is just bing with worse results on top… i never understood how people Can use it.
It supposedly also ha some level of censorship but thats hard to test.
There are so many search engines promising to respect privacy, what makes people use this one?
I tend to like the “bangs” feature that DuckDuckGo offers when it’s set as my browser’s default. Basically by putting !+prefix it automatically redirects your search to a different website. !g will do Google, !b will do Bing, !yt will do YouTube, etc… And it’s quite extensive. Currently, DDG claims to have 13,564 bangs you can use, so if there’s some website with a search bar, chances are it can be banged from DDG.
The search engine from my use over the last 4-6 years generally provides me with “good enough” search results and I enjoy the interface itself, as well as the sorting options when searching images. Every now and then, if i don’t get the results I want, I can just bang a different search engine (I’m just starting to realize the repercussions of using “bang” as a verb…).
I think there are browser extensions that offer pretty much the same functionality but it is something.
I actually found that for me anonymous search result Just kinda suck. When i type [fastfoodbrand] i want the delivery closest to me, not in California or wherever. When i look for a purchase i want web stores that actually deliver where i live.
As a privacy enthusiast i hate that thats my truth, but the truth it is. But with the downfall of reddit, worsening all Results, most trusted sites being bookmarked and the rise of chatgpt* being just as good if not better then google+reddit. i do find i am way less incline to search the internet at all.
*Be as critical ofIt as much as your supposed to be online with strangers anyway. Its a tool and only as smart as you are able to prompt It.
Oh yeah, I reckon there’s a good number of extensions for it too, probably something I should check out as well in the future.
And yeah, it’s definitely a tradeoff of sorts. Denying a browser or search engine access to all personal information, including GPS, might lead to irrelevant results, so I imagine it’s a matter of giving as little information as possible for the maximum relevance in results. GPS is one of those compromises I’ll make as well, though only at the zip code level most of the time, since most apps/sites don’t need to know my precise location.
While I do try and stick to my trusted sites as much as possible, the things I often want to find online are beyond the scope of the sites I have bookmarked. Though bookmarking more sites that I trust and opting to use them over a regular search seems like a good habit to get into