I'm one of those people. It seems like all search engines give pretty similar results, so why not use the one with more privacy? I can even do a quick LLM ask on DDG and with different models. Helpful when search terms are not getting the right match.

I think most people's judgement about DDG is from a few uses and from some time ago. It's worth giving it a shot if you haven't in awhile. But give it a real shot, like use it for a few days to get over the "I hate it because it's different" game that our minds play.

And a major benefit now is you don't just get a fucking popup on your phone every time you're just trying to search something. Like seriously, wtf google. Needy much?

▲ PunchTornado 3 days ago | parent [-]

because behind DDG is bing, microsoft, one of the evilest companies on earth.

▲ godelski 3 days ago | parent [-]

DDG has its own crawler, but yes, it does get most of its index from Bing. But I believe also from places like Yandex (or used to).

I'm no Microsoft fan, but man you're splitting hairs here. And most of the non-Google engines get a good portion of their index from Bing because it is available and saves everyone from getting scraped to death. Though I guess that's happening now anyways...

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources

	▲	avar 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		`> it does get most of its index from Bing` Its "index from Bing" makes it sound like they're paying to rsync-ing over the raw results of Bing's crawler from Microsoft or something. My understanding is that they're simply running a Bing search through Microsoft's API, so Microsoft is getting your search queries in real time. But you (supposedly) get the added anonymity of that going through DDG's servers, and their promise not to do some of their own tracking to put the two together, and they combine Bing's results with their own crawled results. Isn't that how it works?