Technology

While their first party browser convinced me if it's privacy capabilities, I need extensions (yes, recognizing that makes me much more fingerprintable) so I use their browser less than 1% of the time.

However, I have subscribed for their premium Services because I already trust their anti-tracker on my mobile devices and they have sufficient number of VPN nodes to be useful to me (I do miss Mullvad, and probably will use them when I'm traveling International, but it is getting harder to find good nodes and they don't have servers in south Korea at all, either).

And their measures to make a neutered and neutral AI interface is the first time I've ever paid for general AI access, finding it's helped some of my efforts as AI has been a necessary component for building my home studio and mini rack. I'm scared that my brain has already been ruined, acclimating to Google's integration of Bard and then later Gemini, and I make a regular exercise of hunting for sites that have articles or discussions that will help me work through tech projects and puzzles "the hard way" with just vanilla search queries and amendments.

I love that DDG's tech stack seems to play well in the general broader ecosystem, so it's my search engine of choice for all of my Gecko/Fusion browsers (Fennec, WaterFox, LibreWolf, and occasionally, full-fat vanilla Firefox).

I had really thought I could grow into using Kagi but I couldn't make it make sense for myself. When you're limiting paid subscribers at the first tier to 300 general web queries a month, and i could consume that many just on correcting my own typos and re-searches alone, DDG was a better investment for me for the time being.

TL;DR - I love that these guys play well with others, so I'll even pray for the access because I need them to still exist in a decade.

Duck it, we'll search it live

The thing that is hilarious about this is that DDG is powered by Bing. 😂

Now? It's been better than Google for a while. Google's results have been bad for a long time.

Check out yacy, its not well polished but at least it doesn't rely on major search engines afaik (p2p)

The problem with your own searxng instance is that your searches across other engines come from your IP address.

So if you're searching for something, everyone knows it's you using IP triangulation. Google then tracks you around the internet.

If that doesnt bother you, OK great.

Dude I don't even know what that is or what it does and I'm pretty sure most people don't either. It might be easy but what the heck even is it?

There's a DDG privacy first browser on Android. This is probably what they are referring to.

I thought it meant changing your default search engine.

I never considered that it was an app.

We've come full-circle. I used to download .html pages so I could browse them while offline. Now websites install themselves so they can browse you while offline.

I "love" when the wrong technology is applied.

On the the dawn of the smartphones Mozilla tried to enter the space with an FirefoxOS and the pitch was that every app was just a website just more tightly integrated with the phone. The problem is that all the web stack is wonderfully resource hog and at the time phones were super underpowered running websites were not optimized in a browser that were not as optimized as today. So it was a terrible choice for the time being.

Other good one was Android early days. They choose Java as the default app environment and development. It kinda makes sense to use it if you want the same program to run on different platforms, the problem, again, it runs worst and with the underpowered devices of the time everything was a slog. And they doubled down on the mistake by using a garbage collector that doubled the memory usage of every app. The cherry on top, at least in hindsight is that arm was and still is the de facto Android plataform, greatly disminishing the advantage of using Java/JVM. And today Google enabled apps with native code optimized for specific plataforms, but everyone only care about ARM so of you try to run Android like in an Intel laptop a lot of apps are not compatible.

End of rant.