this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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You can always make startpage or ddg your default search engine anyways, both on android and desktop
Takes a couple of seconds to change the default engine, turn off the gnarlier of the telemetry, and disable the sponsored stuff in the new tab page. Infinitely better than any other mainstream browser
Not really a high bar
Duckduckgo proxies bing search results (ober the api, they aren't chad scrapers) and is therefore is under the foot of microsoft. This has forced them to whitelist ms trackers in their privacy tools but I haven't heard anything bad about the search engine.
Startpage scrapes google results so isn't under anyones foot. It has had some controversy due to being bought by an ad company but they haven't seemed to do anything bad yet
In all, startpage is better than duckduckgo
Are you referring to the time when the DuckDuckGo browser was blocking all known trackers except Microsoft trackers? After that information was made public and users complained, DuckDuckGo was able to renegotiate its agreement with Microsoft so that it can block their trackers.
Furthermore, DuckDuckGo now publish their blocklist on GitHub.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-scripts
It’s worth clarifying that this issue affected the DuckDuckGo browser, not the search engine itself.
So if you were refusing to use DuckDuckGo browser on the basis that they allow Microsoft tracking, then that issue has been resolved now. But if you were saying that this incident has made you lose trust in DDG and that’s why you refuse to use it… well, that’s fair enough. It’s your choice, but I personally would trust DDG more than StartPage, just because StartPage is owned by an ad company.
Which search engine do you recommend?
I don't know
Maybe brave search?
I don't think brave is privacy friendly at all
Could you please explain why you don’t think Brave is privacy friendly?
I think Brave Search has a really good privacy policy.
It’s also worth noting that Brave has its own search index… as opposed to DuckDuckGo which uses Bing, and StartPage which uses Google.
Although admittedly this does mean that the search results from Brave Search isn’t the best at the moment. Hopefully this will improve with time.