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!
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
SearXNG is a little tricky to set up, but worthwhile. If you’re lazy, I trust DDG over Brave any day of the week.
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.
“Just trust us,” on the promises of privacy is pusing it, they are all openly sellling your information.
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.
There is a new Linux distro that includes hardened Zen browser and a tool to set up SearXNG locally. There is also an option to have the searches run through three TOR relays. It makes it all super easy to setup if you’re not someone who is self-hosting other services.
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.
Just wait until you start learning about reverse proxies!
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.
And then you find Home Assistant and don’t stop until you literally have the lights automatically be precisely on you and only you, wherever you go in your house.
I run my containers through Tailscale to be able to access my services away from home. But yes, you’re right one container turns into adding another container and on and on. But its a better way than depending on other services that spy and track, etc. I still have a lot that I need to learn and add to the server but for the most part it accomplishes everything I want when I decided to start a server.
I use wireguard on my openWRT firewall, any ISP firewall/modem/router is a joke.
Yep, highly recommend it. Its easy to setup, especially if you already know a little about self-hosting.
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/
You can add this link as a custom search engine to your browser. https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=%25s
I tried NoAI DDG vs Lite vs HTML. Why do No AI and Lite have identical results while HTML is similar but might be reordered or have one or two different results?
Or the HTML version
Thanks for this! HTML version is clean af
I use qwant, mainly because its european. The quality is not that good imo, but its ok for my usage
Same, cause its European and it also is building its own independent index!
Yes. But it’s the only one, who refuses to work if you try to use it without JavaScript. So ddg for me + canvasblocker on firefox / brave browser which also blocks your fingerprint. (But since brave is a an AI and crypto company, i must say… Trust is not what i have a lot of)
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.
I am sorry to tell you but all the browsers on iOS are actually webkit, unless you are in the EU there is a little more freedom there.
Yeah I know. Didn’t saying about that though but ok.
