Hi everyone,
I’m choosing a default search engine and I’m torn between DuckDuckGo and Brave Search. What matters most to me:
Privacy: what’s actually logged, and can the claims be trusted? Independence from Big Tech: DDG partly relies on Bing, while Brave has its own index. Result quality: relevance for daily, technical and niche queries. Trust: track record, controversies, business model.
Which one do you use daily, and why? Have you noticed a real quality difference? Thanks!
Why is brave even an option. Avoid that at all costs.
I use mainly Startpage and Mojeek, sometimes Ecosia and Qwant. Not so for privacy, but by far the best for image search is Yandex (yes, I know). But anyway there is always needed to use several search engines + specific page searches for an deeper research. Respect privacy there are only few conditions, the search engine don’t log your searches (avoiding filter bubble), don’t use AI of big corps, no SEO crap and don’t use tracking cookies, given in most engines except Google, Bing and Yahoo. Privacy isn’t a main problem in other engines as these and finish when you visit the searched page, where the protection from any search engine finish if you do it without proxy or VPN.
SearXNG is a little tricky to set up, but worthwhile. If you’re lazy, I trust DDG over Brave any day of the week.
I’ve been using DDG as my default for probably longer than I ever used Google, so I’ll share my thoughts on it
What I like:
- Nice UI with plenty of options
- Optional AI features
- Great image search with tons of filters and an AI slop blocker that works reasonably well
What I don’t like:
- Localized results are not good (Startpage might be better for those)
- No LLM search API, so I use Brave API for that
They’ve had controversies in the past, but I’ve not heard of any in recent years tbh
AI slop blocker
How does this work? I mean how decides it is Ai slop or not?
Known sources, digital watermarks, and user-contributed reporting.
I stopped using DDG because it kept steering me to articles that were rehosted with paywalls by MSN instead of the actual source of the content.
I use Brave mostly, because they at least pretend to be private, and I actually get some decent results.
Unsurprisingly the best results come from Kagi, the paid service, primarily because they let you cater the results to your preferences. You can blacklist certain sites, prefer others, and even search the “small web” for blogs and such from smaller creators, and the Fediverse at large.
Why pay for some company to watch over you and your searchs? If you want real private searching it comes down to searXNG!
SearXNG is not absolute privacy either. They don’t each have their own index.
No one pays “for some company to watch over you”. The reason why you pay I already gave: because it’s better at what it does.
SearXNG is private iff you use someone else’s instance
Me, I like self hosting things… So it’s actually less private. Multiple search engines get each of my queries lol
Daily reminder that the majority of alternative search engines get their upstream results from Bing or Google. As part of their agreements with Microsoft and Google, they may share some information with them. This is not a secret or anything; you can read it all in their terms of service.
Also a reminder that most of these search engines are black boxes. They’re all closed source and all we have is their “just trust us” promises of privacy and security and none of them have been audited by trusted third parties as far as I am aware. At this point, just use the one that most closely aligns with your personal values and ethics.
DDG has a no ai version which is what I use.
It also has a lite version - https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite
Or the HTML version which I think looks nicer. https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/
Or the HTML version
Thanks for this! HTML version is clean af
If you do any self-hosting, hosting your own instance of SearXNG is a much better way to go. No AI and you actually get results for what you search for. It pulls results from all the other search engines and you can choose which engines you want in settings, and it masks your IP so the other search engines don’t see where the requests actually come from. But even if you don’t self-host, SearXNG is just a much better privacy respecting search engine anyway.
I just started self hosting a Nextcloud instance and I’m absolutely going to look into using Searx on it now. I forgot that was a possibility.
Be careful; one project turns into two, which turns into 3, which turns into a lifestyle! I use searXNG and have a wireguard instance into my LAN so that I can access the nth service I just set up that I cannot believe I have been living without when I am away from the LAN!
May I also suggest pihole be in your list of things to try out, or adguard home if that is they way you swing I will not judge. Once you get your ad blocking setup you will really start noticing the ads in other places and you will then need to go further into ad blocking, when you decide to get your own domain name may I suggest you find a provider that offers a wildcard email option, if you need a free trial service just a little longer create a new account with a new email address or if something gets spammy just have things sent to that address either bounced and deleted or just deleted before it gets to your inbox.
Be careful; one project turns into two, which turns into 3
Actually two turns into four! Otherwise I agree with your reply. :-) My next step for searXNG would be to set it up on a low powered device to access from public (for myself only), and use a VPN on it with rotating IPs. To accessing it outside my home. But I’m not ready for that yet. I’m also kind of scared to get hacked someday.
I am a dumb ass with a BA in the social sciences not computer science, but I was able to get a vanilla OpenWRT installed on a Flint 2 firewall. Sure I did a lot of reading, youtubing, and got a little AI help. The Flint 2 comes with OpenWRT installed on it but everything I read suggested putting a clean install.
I had a slow start to home labbing I started with one pihole than moved to two, than I thought about getting a VPN running but that did not really work I believe I even tried using duckDNS for that but than I did the dumbest thing anyone can do I opened port 22 in my firewall so that I could SSH in. When my internet mystiralisly stopped working correctly I called up my ISP and wow did I ever learn that opening port 22 was a bad idea for how I had it set up at the time. So that stopped me exploring homelabbing for a while, sure after I had new pi installs set up it was never project after project but I never used port 22 again (until recently now that I have crowdsec running) and never used passwordless login. But earlier this year my place flooded and I was out of my home more frequently so I needed to find a way that I could access my pihole and smb (I had given up on using nextcloud at that point but I think I am coming back around to it), so came the Flint 2. With OpenWRT the 3 or 4 projects turned into an infinite number of possibilities.
I use Firefox with Brave search and DDG as a backup. On my iPhone, brave doesn’t always work on Firefox so it redirects to DDG. For what I researched, brave search is more private than what they getting caught for on their browser.
