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Duck Duck Go browser available for Windows
(duckduckgo.com)
Just figured this might be some welcome news to shout out from the crow's nest. Haven't tried it yet myself, so would love some feedback, me hearties!
Eh, DDG is just as shady as most others. Starting with their contract with MS.
Basing their browser off of chromium (or Edge and "underlying OS technology" or however they phrased it) just helps to further the Google monopoly.
Not that I view that quote as fact of any sort, but something to look into before jumping on the bandwagon so to speak.
Then of course there's also DDG's CEO, Gabriel Weinberg.
So the real advice as to what browser to use? Use whatever one you want that has the features you like and enjoy. Anything else is a gamble in terms of support, security, compatibility, and usability.
DDG was also caught downranking search results or censoring them. Regardless of what is being censored I don't think it should be up to the company to decide for individuals. It should be the individual who does their own due diligence and decides for themselves what they want to believe.
Here is the article.
Yep, I've had issues searching for some things on Google before where I could tell Google was adding a political leaning bias, censoring things, or just deranking certain content heavily. So I thought DDG would be a good one to try out with the same searches but I still found it had similar issues. I brought out Yandex and was easily able to find the results I was looking for on the top results.
Now I am sure Yandex also censors stuff too, but its definitely my go to if I'm trying to find things on certain political topics from views Google disagrees with, or for finding things related to piracy.
Honestly getting a bit sad how not even something as generic as a search engine can be free from political censorship.
I haven't used Google in a while. I have been using Brave Search and it has been good. They don't rely on any of the big search engines anymore either. They have been building their own index. Right now they only rely on Google and Bing search for image search.
Thanks for that info, totally forgot Brave had a search. Maybe I'll start making use of them then!
Try out searxng! It aggregates from multiple sesrch engines.
I find that, with companies that roll their own search algorithm that the results are often... lacking. I also don't trust brave as they try to push their crypto on you.
For what its worth, on the browser side of tbings, I run firefox w/ arkenfox
I'm glad that I recently migrated to SearXNG!
improving.duckduckgo.com is not something they try to hide, you can easily disable it in your search engine settings. DDG was launched in 2008 and has a pretty solid track record - I think we can forgive the Names DB thing at this point.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I love when fellow seafarers go through this kind of effort. 🙏