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Comment by teitoklien | Hacker News Reader

For day to day searching i use duckduckgo by default on every device. Not a lot because of privacy, something about that company ticks me off in terms of privacy.

I like duckduckgo’s interface and I feel they genuinely put a lot of effort to ensure people have a great experience using their search engine.

Whether its their !bang feature or integration with apple maps or their various themes. (Heck even their no js, search engine option is very cool too).

In terms of quality of links and interesting content, i havent come across a search engine better then marginalia[0] for that. But then i search for weird stuff, so who knows.

[0](https://search.marginalia.nu/)

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> Not a lot because of privacy, something about that company ticks me off in terms of privacy.

Ditto, I just want something that isn't Google. That company has too many fingers in too many pies.

DuckDuckGo isn't more private. That is like when Google was serious about the Don't Be Evil slogan - there is nothing technically stopping them and sooner or later principles get worn down by reality (commercial, political or otherwise).

They are sincere today. Great, thanks. But there is nothing here to guarantee what they'll do in the future. I argue that people should use DuckDuckGo. But privacy combined with a public, ad-funded, search engine is just an unreasonable expectation. Anyone looking for that will be disappointed. But they are smaller and more focused - both of which are good if you want to be strategic about data leaking out.

I could be incorrect in my assumption here so please let me know:

I assume as a user of DDG that they aren't collecting data on me. However back when Google was following their motto and young, they WERE still collecting data, weren't they?

If that's true (IF) then that would make this an unfair comparison. If DDG eventually erodes their morals and stops caring about privacy then I could just stop using them and they would have no historic data on me.

That aside though, what is your alternative? Yes they may in the future collect data but they certainly don't right now, so why not use them now while they don't rather than giving in and just using Google and accepting the surveillance?

>... why not use them now while they don't rather than giving in and just using Google and accepting the surveillance?

That user sounds like they do use DDG but are cautious about how their business model may change in the future. They even think more people should be using it:

>I argue that people should use DuckDuckGo.

They're just advocating for awareness. If anything, their stance is what all of us who regularly use DDG should take, so that DDG is aware that their userbase would be likely to seek other alternatives should they change their ways. It keeps the pressure on them to "do right".

I think that comparing DDG to a young google is an awful comparison and nigh on useless. DDG's reputation for privacy is they're selling point, and they know they would be found out quickly if they do surreptitious stuff because many eyes are on them and would love to nail them to the wall for reneging on the promise to keep searches private. The same logic applies so that they only use search related ads and not tracking/unique ID ads.

> I like duckduckgo’s interface and I feel they genuinely put a lot of effort to ensure people have a great experience using their search engine.

Yeah, it seems like DDG is the only one that has any decent customization options.

Custom theming is nice but not mandatory for me, the biggest ones for me are Center Alignment and Page Width set to Wide. It's not 1995 anymore, we have wide screens and having the search results showed in to one side of the screen while the other half is mostly empty looks awful. And I think it would be pretty easy to implement those few settings, especially for Google but it's not like they care, it took them over 20 years to implement dark mode.

Do people really use their web browsers in full screen? I've got an ultrawide screen and it's very rare that I have windows wider than about a quarter of my display.

But then I favor narrow-strip-of-text style web design too. I find it really hard to read long lines of text. I want 65-80 characters at most, like you'd find in a book.

Since when is Apple Maps a positive thing? Did I miss something?

You may have missed the years and years of improvement made since it was launched.

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