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I understand that having the DDG browser on Linux is difficult. It would be great if there was a way to just sync bookmarks and passwords using the browser extension for other browsers.

I use DDG browser for work and mobile and Firefox on Guix.

     we don’t censor search results

Sure they do. They preemptively censor entire torrent sites. Everyone one they can, from what I can tell.

“We don’t censor results”… well…

Either that is completely bullshit, or it’s technically-bullshit.

1. They don’t have to censor because their sources censor for them. “Oh we’re just an aggregator of censored results” doesn’t mean “this is an uncensored search engine” like the claim would have you believe.

2. Proof of this is evident in by comparing Russian yandex.com, my now go to for anything related to hacking, pirated anything, topics of censorship or controversial discussion, even “legit” but rarer information like how to train or use X or Y AI model, etc. The domains that appear on yandex remind me a time gone by. Like image search before Pinterest, unreliable but not sterilized.

3. I use DDG everyday. In the last year or so, I have found myself going to Google, Bing, Brave, Yandex, SearX, and other more than ever. The quality of DDG has for me, unquestionably slipped. I have a strong distaste for Google, and have used them this year more than ever.

They are not uncensored, although maybe they allow that burden to be done for them to keep their nose high in their air on the topic.

However, I fear it may be a moot point as I find myself looking elsewhere often now.

Brave has a much better AI search than either Google or DuckDuckGo.

How many people know about https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/ ?

Is a version of DuckDuckGo without Javascript. Very fast and compatible with minimalistic web browser like lynx.

A surprising fact I /do/ know about DDG: they don't update bang searches anymore, which was one of my favorite differentiators. This feature adds a lot of utility to DDG as a browser default search engine.

You can search "!w Gabriel Weinberg" and it will open the Wikipedia article because of the leading exclamation mark and w. If a site changes their search url, you can submit the precise new pattern they should use for a redirect. If a new service pops up, you can use the same form to request a new search prefix. These form submissions could give someone at DDG an easy interface to verify quickly and approve or reject them.

These form submissions get ignored and have been for years at this point.

I went to DDG to get away from all the Google AI stuff being shoved down my throat.

While it seems DDG is on the same path of AI / chat centric search UX, at least they allow me to turn off all that stuff. But... search has gotten so bad in general, DDG is having the same results issue I had on Google. I don't see DDG as a player in the Ai space so I think my usage will only decrease as search result quality continues to decrease.

I am hopeful in the long run that search index / results will become better as the core UX for most people becomes chat, search result pages become low human traffic (meaning ads are worthless), and search becomes one of many research tools for to the agents

The slow speed at which DuckDuckGo loads/responds to searches from Asia is quite apparent. I don't know if supporting IPV6 would improve this (will they?), but I see faster results from almost every search engine compared to DDG, which is unfortunate.

Hello duckduckgo team! I have been using ddg for a long time and I really enjoy it

Although I occasionally have to use google for https://images.google.com/

Is there any way that duckduckgo can have something similar or perhaps there already is and I am not aware of it, either way, I would love to know more about it and have a nice day!

DDG bangs is a nice feature. But feels neglected. No way to see a changelog and lots of old broken bangs. There is a form to submit new bangs suggestions but unclear if anyone reads the submissions or how the acceptance process works. No forum or other channel where users can discuss or upvote suggestions for new or changed bangs.

This was an interesting read. I'm surprised by the market share statistics especially. It feels higher than my lived experience would suggest, but I am likely missing context on broader population usage.

Ever since I started getting captcha prompts on DDG I had to stop using it (same for google).

https://0x0.st/K4kE.png

One thing not mentioned in TFA but I came across following the 'we're hiring' link to the Back-end Engineer role. They use PERL (v5). That certainly surprised me!

I did not know you can actually find good results with DDG. :>

All search engines got so much worse in the last years - it is so sad. We lost some of our knowledge that way.

This already started before AI, but AI further reduces the quality now.

the most surprising thing is why they didn't change this terribly long and impossible to remember name which completely killed them after all these years

yes, yes, I know why it's named like that

Brave search is far better. It does it's own indexing which is better than google or bings, and lets you up rank or down rank websites without having to set up an account

~3 years off google search.

Funny how people are still making jokes about yahoo search, when it works better than google.

I use the DDG browser about 80% of the time. Duck.ai is an interesting product, like Proton’s AI chatbot - both privacy preserving.

Since this is turning into a DDG AMA thread of sorts --

I love DDG! However it's search term autocorrect is really broken when DDG decides for me I must not be looking for exactly what I typed.

It seems to assume that if there isn't a lot of results then it's my fault for typing a "bad" query? Sometimes it makes up a new search out of whole cloth in this case with terms not even close to what I typed.

I get the utility for detecting+correcting typos but DDG often takes this way too far. Posting this in friendly criticism, happy user otherwise!

duck.ai is nice

I'm certainly in the minority on this site, but I love that they offer noai.duckduckgo.com - I'm really, really tired of AI everywhere. It wouldn't be so bad, if the results were accurate (no idea about duck.ai, since I avoid it) and didn't take up a solid third of screen real estate. Until AI results get vastly better and stop hallucinating, I will suppress them if I can. Please keep this feature.

They've never allowed a third-party to audit the "privacy" inside their code/platform that is claimed.

Suspicious as heck to have enough money for supporting +300 employees plus all other operating costs without an obvious money cow for those costs.

Rather use Qwant, Brave or even Ecosia.

I don't think Google, Bing, or anyone else plan to syndicate their AI results the way they did their search results, so DuckDuckGo will go from being unnecessary to obsolete.

I just hope you guys are sincere and not doing shady things to people who are trusting you. Your mission is noble, I really hope you keep succeeding.

Reading the mentioned How We Work[1] page made be curious about how things are handled across timezones. E.g. A Friday all-hands meeting is mentioned, but wouldn't that either be Thursday or Saturday for some? Not to mentioned possibly being in the wee hours of the morning?

For context, my team lives in a timezone ~17 ahead of the parent company and they seem to really have difficulty grappling with the idea of not scheduling meetings with me for three in the morning.

(Seasonal related practices like taking holidays during our summer in the other hemisphere also seems to be perplexing.)

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/how-we-work

I'm getting 'forbidden'on https://noai.duckduckgo.com/lite/, or there is some other way of getting there?

I don't like the current AI trends much, but I've found duck.ai the best way to experiment with AI. I've had mixed results with DDG search and the site is sometimes slow to load.

The reason I don’t use DuckDuckGo is that when you sell keyword based ads on your platform, it really isn’t private. If you’ve ever worked with keyword based ads, they might be anonymous, but anything you are searching is showing up somewhere to some third party.

I really like Kagi, becuase I can pay for the search and my searches aren’t being leaked to third parties.

Wow. You launched in 2008? Congratulations!!! 17 years, privately owned, in the business of search which is tough because google just dominates. I wish you another 17 years bro. DuckDuckGo is my primary search now.

Firstly, Thank you to the entire DuckDuckGo team. DuckDuckGo is the browser I use most all the time. Any product that stops or reduces tracking and surveillance capitalism, I am happy to use and support.

Do you have plans to build an email service without the tracking? Would love to hear thoughts about this. There may be users willing to pay a small monthly fee for this.