https://duckduckgo.com/traffic
Still impressive though
I'm happy to sacrifice some of my data, in order to get top notch search results.
Google's gotten so good with all that, that they've got me by the balls.
If you search anything that has a political interest, it is better to use DDG but everything else Google does it better.
With DuckDuckGo I don't get results tailored to my profile, but with a bit of time I got a pretty decent intuition what keywords have good chances for quality results. In the beginning I jumped back to Google for some tricky searches, nowadays I don't even bother because I know the results will most likely be even worse.
Add to that how much google search results are these days already, and it's just not worth it anymore.
But even that obscures the most important considerations: what does "some data" mean, and to whom are you revealing it? So if we make it a bit more verbose (but still keeping to the facts), it's more like: "I'm happy to reveal my browsing and purchasing history to unknown third parties, in unknown juristictions around the world, in order to get top notch search results." If you're happy to do make that trade, great, but I'd argue it's not such an obviously good deal as you make it sound.
I used DDG for a couple of years and I was recurrently reverting to Google. Since I changed to Qwant, I only use Google when looking for images. (I'm in Portugal, in other locations might be different).
I'm using DDG now.
For past year or so I have been using reddit as a search engine when looking for suggestions on products, services etc.
Google - mostly for google maps local results.
And DuckDuckGo for anything else.
Moi? I start with DDG. If I feel I need a second opinion, I'll try Google.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...
It's proprietary
They refused independent source audit
Their android app was leaking your browsing history to their servers: https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/527
They are operated from the USA, so government (CIA/FBI) has all the data they want, whenever they want
That is not how internet works
Work on hidding/spoofing your identity, and use what everyone uses, you better hidden if you are one of the billions of users than one of the thousands
Also pays in Tesco Supermarket vouchers (£5) every month or so for doing their little quizzes and then combined desktop/mobile searches which is nice.
Also considered Privacy friendly: https://blog.ecosia.org/tag/privacy/
In my experience duckduckgo tends to behave more like how google used to work, so if you pick a few well chosen keyword you tend to find stuff pretty quickly but it doesn't respond too well to ambiguous terms or full sentences, google is better at those.
Sorry, but I have to agree with you. I don't understand how people treat ddg as a viable alternative to google, and I'm surprised by this community's enthusiasm for a search engine whose first result for 'hacker news' is thehackernews.com.
Their pop ups when using Edge are an unjustified FUD campaign.
