Privacy

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DuckDuckGo vs Brave Search: which one is better for privacy, independence, and result quality? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 days ago by Osm@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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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!

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[–] ComradePedro@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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

[–] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

AI slop blocker

How does this work? I mean how decides it is Ai slop or not?

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 4 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Known sources, digital watermarks, and user-contributed reporting.

[–] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I see. Well that makes sense and is indeed useful then.

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Note, I have only seen filters for the image search. But there's definitely a lot of slop among the images even though you select to exclude slop. There's just so much slop out there I guess.

[–] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 3 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I view this comparable to an ad-blocker extension in the browser. It doesn't block all ads, but it does a decent job that the result is usable. Maybe that is the effect, maybe less. As long as they do not heuristic decision and only go about known stuff, then I'm all for it. My first thought was "oh they fight ai with ai", but that is not the case as it seems. But it depends on the sources for that filter. If they use Ai to detect, then I'm not a big fan of the filter.

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago

Indeed. Note also that I'm only certain about the user reporting, as I've done some reporting of my own. I stopped after a while though. There's so much that it feels futile.

But, the other ways of determining should be possible too.

[–] sudoer777@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

For LLM I use open-websearch which supports a ton of search engines