Qwant vs DuckDuckGo, which is better for privacy (search engine)?
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Hi guys,
is Qwant or DuckDuckGo better for privacy and features?
Have a nice day.
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@Pliex Hi,
From my understanding, DuckduckGo is incredibly privacy focused. Qwant has an interest in privacy, but its main selling point is being based in europe.
As far as features, I much prefer duckduckgo for it's !bang search syntax.
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For most safety Qwant should be the best. (not tested!)
The Duck uses so many sources... then you can also use Google. ^^ -
@Ice007 said in Qwant vs DuckDuckGo, which is better for privacy (search engine)?:
The Duck uses so many sources... then you can also use Google. ^^
Using DDG is not at all equivalent to using Google, especially considering Google isn't one of their sources. DDG serves essentially as a proxy for your searches, to the sources it looks like it is coming from DDG, none of your information is passed to them, including your IP address. DDG doesn't track you, and there's no personalization of results -- the same search done by different people will yield the same results, except of course for any changes to those results over time.
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Qwant vs DuckDuckGo, which is better for privacy
Of those two only, then DDG. However if you cast your net more widely, it transpires one can actually have one's cake & eat it too, ie, good privacy AND good search results.
I used DDG for many years [motivated by its privacy provisions], but gradually grew tired of it returning poorer quality hits compared to Gargle [which i didn't use directly myself, but did indirectly by using Ixquick --> Startpage]. IMO the big Achilles heel of DDG is its use of Bing. From my testing all the several Bing-predicated SEs get poorer results than Gargle, yet i will never ever use Gargle. As i mentioned, my workaround was to change from DDG to SP.
Then the damn mess blew up about SP being sold to a dodgy advertising user-tracking company, so i abandoned SP & returned to DDG... thus again incurring a drop in hits quality. Eventually it seemed that the interwebz decided that maybe SP is actually still ok after all. However in that interim period i had discovered Searx.
It took me a while to get my head around the concept of meta-SEs, & then the specifics of how best to configure the range of Searx options, not to mention how to choose a preferred Searx Instance. Some of us in the forum have discussed this topic before, & i remain grateful to @Catweazle for telling me about the Ninja Instance of Searx, which ever since then has been my default SE in V. It gives me great results, including via Gargle, without any of the abusive tracking etc of that Weusedtopretendnottobeevil company.
Spoiler
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If you use https://searx.me then they are both as private as each other.
So are all the other search engines you pick to use behind the mask of searx.
You can have private google and bing searches too.
You can search as many search engines as you want, all at the same time.
You can have your cake and eat it.
You can go to the ball Cinderella.
In fact you can eat your cake at the ball.Is Searx private ?
Indeed, it is also an open source solution you can even host yourself for total control of what happens. -
From my understanding, DDG is tops for privacy. But I agree with @Steffie on the results being hit-or-miss (with a lot more 'miss' than I would like). Consequently, I use a combination of DDG, SP, and... ugh... Yandex—the latter only because it has excellent image-searching capabilities.
I gave Searx a spin, but I don't really understand the whole instances thing, and the results I have obtained under multiple instances are not only highly inconsistent between one another, as well as being sub-optimal in terms of returning the hits I am after. On top of that, there are lots of bugs and broken images, etc.
Qwant, I am not very familiar with. It seems to return similar results to DDG, so I'm assuming that it's powered by Bing also?
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@purgat0ri said in Qwant vs DuckDuckGo, which is better for privacy (search engine)?:
From my understanding, DDG is tops for privacy. But I agree with @Steffie on the results being hit-or-miss (with a lot more 'miss' than I would like).
I have read a lot of people write similar sentiments, but I use DDG almost exclusively, and I pretty much without fail find what I'm looking for. For quick generic searches, like give me this movie's Rotten Tomato, IMDb, and Wikipedia pages, the results are always in the top few, along with a couple of other good review sites. When doing research, which would require me to dig into multiple pages of any search engine results, I still find what I'm looking for with ease.
I'm certain there are some specific searches for which other engines would yield better results, just as I'm certain there are some specific searches for which other engines would yield worse results. For everyday use, however, I just don't see a significant difference. If it was an issue, I wouldn't use it as my default search engine.
Then it just comes down to, here's a list of search engines which all give fairly similar results, that also respect your privacy, which interface do you prefer. For my taste, that's DDG. I like the large number of results per page, and the continuous scrolling page, and the appearance settings. StartPage, I tried to use for a little while, but didn't really like its interface, similarly with Ecosia. I forget which of those two it was, but after a few pages of results which only included like 10 or so per page, you had to like confirm you actually were a person through a captcha. FTS. I wanted to like Ecosia, but couldn't adjust to the interface. I can't recall either of the sites giving worse (or better) results, just feeling less efficient and comfortable. I like being able to configure the typefaces & colors I see on a site.
I'm not sure if quoting that like would ping @Steffie, so there you go.
I post from my phone frequently, which likes to change "the" to "three". If you see three or similar, I probably meant "the". I use swipe, so typos can be totally unrelated words to what I intended. Knowing this should help you read through my typos.
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The searx instances are made available by people that choose to host their own and make them public.
Many have preconfigured their instance towards their own taste so results will vary depending on the engines they have on/off by default.
Ideally pick one close or fast and use that instance so you can save your prefs.
https://searx.space
You can use a cookie or a more anonymous custom link
You can then configure the engines used and many other useful options.
Each main search topic has its own set of engines you can use for more refined searching.If you want a direct comparison, disable all the general search engines except DDG and Quant.
You have to remember to save your settings at the bottom of the engines prefs pages.If it were not for the fact Vivaldi gets some money from us using the preinstalled search options, I would suggest that Vivaldi host an instance.
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@BoneTone Yep, usually the problems emerge when I am looking for something very specific: i.e., a particular article or section of a particular website that I have visited before, but can't entirely recollect. In a lot of those instances, Google or SP will succeed where DDG fails.
But in general, I don't think DDG performs a lot worse than other search engines. To be honest, my use cases for the major search engines are somewhat limited to begin with. I usually send my search queries directly to websites associated with a particular topic (e.g., The Movie Database when I'm looking for info about a TV series/movie, or Bing Academic/Google Scholar for journal articles, etc.), rather than going through a general search engine. That means I only really use DDG et al. for:
- News: Has Vivaldi made the headlines this week? What are the other browsers doing? (I have no idea what leads me to compulsively check on this)
- Images: Mostly to feed my insatiable appetite for new speed dial/desktop backgrounds.
- Articles: When I have been too negligent to save an article that I end up needing later, and it doesn't show up in my history, I rely on search engines to compensate for my failing memory.
@Dr-Flay Sounds like too much trouble, to be honest. I appreciate the info, though.
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@purgat0ri said in Qwant vs DuckDuckGo, which is better for privacy (search engine)?:
I usually send my search queries directly to websites associated with a particular topic
Yes, exactly, me too. For that purpose, V's personalised/custom search lists are tremendously helpful.
Spoiler
I've spent the past few hours researching the new packages i need to overcome the Conky failure that occurred back in August from a
luaupdate. I simply went directly to the Arch & AUR sites with my keywords in their respective entries here in the drop-down. Simply wonderful. -
The search engines I use
More than a possible trace, which none of these network search engines use (neither does Startpage, despite its sale to this company), what interests me most is that none of them have the effect of Filter Bubble, so annoying and dangerous in Gargle, Bing, Yahoo.
The Peekier search engine is very interesting, because instead of displaying only a list of the results, like others, it displays thumbnails of the specific pages. That's how you know what's there, no need to go in.
For searching images I use this extension (FOSS)
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I've used a lot of engines. I worked with Qwant for a long time, but dropped it for DDG. The reason, I'm in USA and Qwant was very European centric. I wanted my results more USA centric.
I also used Searx a lot. But gave up on it a couple years ago because the hosts I chose were problematic. They sometimes didn't come up or took too long to open the page. I didn't feel I was getting better results than DDG and it took longer. I try them again though.
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@guigirl , I have assumed that Google has no competition as searchengine, but you can do without using Google directly, either by using a search engine that uses its engine, such as Startpage, or better to use a meta search engine that uses several engines, such as SearX (I use it) and others.
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@guigirl , my post is public access. More than G search, I am concerned about the retirement of G APIs from Chromium next month.
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