What are /r/duckduckgo's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

DuckDuckGo's certs are perfectly fine but NordVPN was trying to fuck with either DDG's code or DDG's certs, my best advice would be to use a different VPN, I'd recommend IVPN but ProtonVPN also has a robust privacy policy

Probably Firefox for most use cases.

Although i find myself using, uzbl and Dillo for some tasks, i particularly find Dillo useful for reading when i don't want distractions.

!bangs are always the first thing to come to mind. The ability to search any website right from DDG (and of course, your web browser if DDG is your default) is way too valuable. It's the reason I switched to DDG.

DuckDuckGo has amazing instant answers, many of which created by the community (http://Duck.co). Wanna know who Aphrodite is? DDG it. What exactly is a lager? DDG it.

Those are the two big non-privacy related things (bangs are seriously great!), but if you want to know more about what DDG can do, I'd recommend taking the tour!

I think ProtonMail is the obvious answer and I don't see anything to worry much about wrt their logging policy. They say in your link that your IP address will only ever be retained if you're involved in attacking their infrastructure. Obviously you have to trust them on that, but you do with any webmail provider.

That said, you might find Posteo interesting. They have very respectable policies around data security and privacy.

Thank you!

On slowness, we have gotten a lot faster over the past year, but it depends where you are located. We're starting to get servers across the world now, so in the next year I hope to generally have that under control.

On results, those have gotten a lot better as well. We'd always appreciate you sending in specific examples as that is the fastest way we improve those types of queries.

We don't really know what goes on inside DDG, but at least they've promised to not track your requests, and that's one of their differentiators. If they are keeping their promise, there's no record of your search.

Now, suppose they began to use a CDN. Cloudflare, for example, states they do log requests. So then, there would be no difference between the big guys and DDG.

In fact, they do! There are several, it looks like. !bulbapedia is there, but there are also !bulba, !bpedia, and slickly enough, !bp. Give it a shot!

EDIT: Also, if you manage to find a site that somehow isn't on the list, there's a link on the page to request one. I did that a while back, and now !bctags is a thing, to search Bandcamp for a certain tag of music.

I've been getting really annoyed with Google straight-up ignoring keywords or getting results that don't include ANY of my keywords (not even the cached versions) so I'm more than happy to give another engine a shot. I type things for reasons and stuff, Googsy.

Feels like the bang searches take a while to respond or serve results, though maybe that's not DDG's fault, but I love that you guys have this:

• https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lorem+ipsum

For the truly lost:

This is a screenshot from the auto-fill list of Bang searches that comes up when you start typing !saf. The Bang searches change how your search is executed, and they each have a little logo, usually for whatever service they're forwarding you to.

!safeoff, however, keeps you at DDG, but disables Safe Search, which in the vast majority of cases done by people intentionally searching for pornography, which is generally filtered out by Safe Search.

So the logo they chose for !safeoff is the normal DuckDuckGo logo, modified so that the duck is winking at you, implying that the duck knows what you're doing, you little porn-searching rascal you.

Just thought I'd say I've been using DDG as my primary search engine for... I dunno. A while. Months, definitely. I do sometimes finding my self doing +g though, mainly for online shops since even after setting my region (UK), DDG seems to frontpage a lot of US shops.

Also I recommed it to everyone.

Oh, and just for kicks:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=anatidaephobia&kl=uk-en

I'm sorry that you're seeing this :-( As /u/draica pointed out, unfortunately this has been around for a while and is a virus or fake virus pretending to be from us. We have nothing to do with a system.exe file - the only installable files we have right now are browser extensions and our mobile app ( https://duckduckgo.com/app ). If you see anything else similar to this, please stay well away from it and feel free to ask again here whenever you're unsure.

You're not looking for a search engine, you're looking for Tor. It's not any search engine's job to keep you safe from that stuff. It's not really even within their ability.

I trust DDG not to store my info, but all those other sites will use cookies, LSOs, browser fingerprinting, and to a degree your IP address to keep track of you. Using the bundled Tor browser with javascript disabled, no flash/other plugins, and no cookies takes care of the first ones, and Tor takes care of the IP when it's all used together properly.

If you're really ~~paranoid~~ serious about privacy, try using Tails or similar.

I don't think I can give you a direct comparison as ultimately email and search are too very different beasts.

A big part of our privacy comes from our decision to not store your data, which can't be done the same way by email providers.

At the end of the day it's about finding a company you feel you can trust, reading the Privacy Policy and making a judgement call.

Personally, I do really like Fastmail they have a Privacy Policy that is clear and easy to understand: https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html - they outline the influences of their jurisdiction, what happens to any data stored, and how it is handled if you delete your account.

(Note this is a personal endorsement not an official one.)

Due to the Samsung Internet icon to the bottom right of the DuckDuckGo icon, this means that you have added DuckDuckGo as a web app through Samsung Internet. As such, when you are searching on DuckDuckGo, you are using the Samsung Internet browser to do so. The DuckDuckGo website is not designed to prevent your browser from saving your search history.

If you do not want have your search history saved on your device, you can download the DuckDuckGo browser app from Google Play or F-Droid. The DuckDuckGo browser gives you a button to wipe all your history within the app.

No there is no plans for one on desktop, as for firefox, you can harden FF from tracking using the tips here https://www.privacytools.io/browsers/#about_config

The Google results for that query are not that great, either. Keep in mind, you're asking the internet to describe an odor to you.

Yeah it feels like the images are only bonus. What I'd like to see is a different search page filled with images. https://duckduckgo.com/images/?q=test should give us a page filled with pics imho. I'm aware that you can expand the top bar, but it still isn't a lot and YES the picture are too small.

This is the term I’ll be using if it turns out that DDG collects user data anyway because of gag orders in the USA. Imo, they should move their legal HQ to Switzerland just like Quad9 did recently to add more weight to their privacy claim.

https://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html/

First result when I Googled "goodies ddg" without quotations.

But when I perform the same search on Duck Duck Go, I get a lot of useless results and still haven't managed to find the link.

Edit for science: The search "goodies duckduckgo" without quotations and auto completed by DDG, the Tor version of the goodies page is still the fifth result with the main link still nowhere to be found. All searches were done with Firefox mobile with cleared and cookies disabled.

Here are two sites that list privacy cautious email providers (and a lot of other privacy aware services and applications)

https://prism-break.org/en/subcategories/gnu-linux-email-accounts/

https://www.privacytools.io/#email

I suggest you look through their recommendations and pick the one that looks best for your preferences. Personally I use Kolabnow, which is recommended by both sites.

It sounds like you just hate the entire experience. Bummer.

In case you weren't aware, there's a way to use other sites’ features from DDG. !bang syntax.

It works like this. Instead of “google maps best beer in San Diego” just search for “best beer San Diego !maps”. DDG redirects you directly to the Google Maps of your search. “Dodge meme !i” takes you to Google Images. “ERB Batman !yt” takes you to YouTube. “iOS fonts !g” will even take you directly to Google search results from DDG. !bangs are extensive and usually do what you'd expect them to without looking them up first. Ex: !a = Amazon, !y = yahoo, !w = Wikipedia, !ebay, !so = Stack Overflow.

Finally, you can avoid that top line of Wikipedia stuff by turning off Instant Answers in your settings.

But maybe DDG just isn't right for you. It sounds like maybe you could work around some of the user experience stuff, but really want the Google experience with a tiny bit more privacy. May I suggest the Ghostery extension for your browser? https://www.ghostery.com/

There is a dedicated link for !bang suggestions, and this seems to be a regular (as in, no special hacks required) request:

https://duckduckgo.com/newbang.html

edit: Alternatively, if you're into some programming you could use duckduckhack.com for developing an instant answer plugin :)

>Owned by Amazon.com

What? no!

>DuckDuckGo was solo-founded by Gabriel Weinberg in February 2008 and is >based out of Valley Forge, PA (USA). It has been self-funded to date. Now there are several great people who make regular contributions, though Gabriel is still the only full-time person.

https://duckduckgo.com/faq.html

>Still looks like spam since you are selling a new search engine that no doubt has ads to make money just like the others.

You can turn the ads off (which are pretty small anyway) in settings.

You're correct, G is redirecting https://www.google.com/analytics to https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/ . Even if you go to the last URL that you posted, you will be redirected by G to an account login screen.

Why not ProtonMail?

Protonmail is free, open sourced on browser side, and has a very strict privacy policy. Also it is located in Switzerland, and they own their own servers.

I personally use Vivaldi. It's based on Chromium, but with all Google stuff removed. I think the privacy policy is very agreeable. https://vivaldi.com/privacy/browser/

I prefer Vivaldi because of the insane customisation options and quality of life it offers.

And of course, if you want to stay private online, you can slap on all the usual Chrome extensions like Disconnect, uBlock Origin, Decentraleyes, ScriptSafe, all that good stuff.

This does look like a bug, from the screenshots. Are you using any region settings? I'm not able to reproduce it on my end:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Thunderbird+themes

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=thunderbird+themes

Is anyone still able to replicate?

Besides adding DDG to your search box, you could also make it the default search in your awesome bar, which is probably closer to what you're after. Then whenever you enter something into your address bar, it'll run a DDG search, or take you to the first result if you preface your query with "! "

Open a new tab, type in: "about:config"

Filter for "keyword.url"

Double-click that item, and enter your DDG URL. For a basic DDG search, you could just type: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=

... and that would run a DDG search anytime you type something into the awesome bar, or an I'm Feeling Ducky search anytime you preface your query with a bang and a space.

Or you could customize your DDG with any of the settings here and enter that into keyword.url instead.

Choose whatever options you want on that page, and then scroll down to the bottom and copy the link it spits out below. You can add whatever variables you want, but just make sure you tack "&q=" to the end of it when you make it the search string for keyword.url.

No problem -- it isn't for everyone, and I apologize if this campaign rubbed you the wrong way. For programmers, we've been trying to incorporate all sorts of tech goodies to make those kids of searches better -- after all, I'm a hacker myself.

If you remember some of the searches you did a few months ago, I'd appreciate you sharing them. We're always trying to improve, especially in this area.

On look and feel, note you can customize via the settings. We're also working on a more polished look.

Looks cool! You may be interested this list of privacy search engines that we made (including ours): https://alternativeto.net/list/13568/privacy-search-engines/.

are you serious? whatsapp is owned by fucking facebook. and there was a competition that would give a lot of money (i don't remember exactly how much) if someone hacked telegram and no one won.

edit: found it: https://telegram.org/crypto_contest

$200,000 and no one did it

edit2: their privacy policy: https://telegram.org/privacy#3-what-personal-data-we-use

I'm not sure about the flags but I'll let our design team know there's interest. They oversee a Dribbble account where most of the fun design-y stuff is posted and if they're shareable, we could add them there: https://dribbble.com/duckduckgo

Edit: I originally thought you meant the region flags but now I'm not sure since you said, "in instant answers." Can you clarify?

OpenVPN does not accept donations as far as I know (they are supported by their commercial software).

Protonmail has an open source client and server, and you can donate here: https://protonmail.com/donate

This is a going to be a deployable CSS-theme with or without DDG support to modernize their UI. It'll work on Safari, Chrome, Firefox* and Edge with extensions like Stylus.

* ^(Backdrop-filter isn't supported by default on Firefox. https://caniuse.com/css-backdrop-filter)

There's a setting in the Settings menu that you can disable the keyboard shortcuts through: https://duckduckgo.com/settings.html (under the Layout tab).

If your browser has JavaScript disabled, it will automatically default to the HTML version.

(using 'J" and "K" will also scroll the results btw)

As with my Signal flyers, I seem to have underestimated the communities of DDG and Signal respectively. :)

Here's the link! Watermarks are included, but I appreciate any 'extra' credit as well. The link expires in 30 days.

Switching from Windows to Linux is definitely a good start, good first choices would be Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

For browsing you could use Firefox, to me it seems like the best privacy browser right now, but some extra privacy extensions are still necessary. A good email provider to switch from Gmail or whatever could be Protonmail.

VPNs are a tricky question because the paid ones are proprietary and closed source for security reasons, while the free ones could be making money from selling data to advertisers. One option would be to buy NordVPN with cryptocurrencies to stay anonymous. Another option is hosting your own VPS but it might be more expensive and complicated.

Other than that just use your brain and avoid exposing yourself unnecessarily.

I considered PIA but seeing that it's based in the US, I went with another VPN - NordVPN. I also thought about getting ExpressVPN but it was way too expensive for me. I chose according to the Torrentfreak's article .

is a famous add-on created to block trackers. It shows statistics of blocked trackers.

What I did was disabling the firefox's built-in track protection function and use the add-on.

+1 for AnySoftKeyboard. Seems odd at first but I actually hate using anything else now. You can get it off of the Play Store or F-Droid. I myself have tried using F-Droid as much as possible.

Yes, this works in DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mustang+-cars

There's a list of that and other syntax here: https://duck.co/help/results/syntax Personally I find "site:" (for in-site search) and "intitle:" (for emphasis of a term) helpful as well.

The results that you are getting are accurate because the Nazi's were the National Socialists Party, so DDG is returning accurate results. To help eliminate Nazi references, eliminate the search term National: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=socialist+wallpaper+-national&iax=1&ia=images

That's my biggest gripe with DDG right now. Special symbols often get ignored, e.g. a search for semiš (chamois leather in czech) gives results for semi.

Before this gets off track, I want to reiterate that we're attempting to become fully (and only) reliant on our community. The path to doing that, while remaining operable and providing a mainstream product, requires that we leverage other data sources and focus our limited resources in specific areas (i.e. not distributed crawling or trying to build our own index---which is expensive and difficult). If your point is to open source based on verification of security/privacy, I'd recommend reading Gabriel (our founder)'s response to trust questions

It looks like "-site: about.com" works.

For example, the search <code>reddit -site:reddit.com</code> has a bunch of results, none of which are on reddit.com itself.

According to the Bangs List, you should simply submit the fixed !bang as a new bang, on the New Bang page. Perhaps add a note in the comments that it already exists, but is broken. That's what I've done before, and it's gotten patched up.

Here's DDG's page about why you should care. For example, AOL released search results that were able to be tied back to users. DDG's privacy policy says they won't store this information.

Worked for one of the top SEO companies in the States for more than three years and have been a web developer for 11 years so I'm more than familiar with how to get proper search results.

Google and other online services over the years have become softened by user generalizations and other influences from the unwashed masses -- it's why Pandora has gotten so bad.

From the Google search help page:

>Every word matters. Generally, all the words you put in the query will be used.

My point is that Google had a penchant for including all keywords without requiring operators and overly-specific terms but has since gotten too smart (dumb) for its own good. In the 90s, it was rare to get results that didn't include what you were searching for.

Check out mycroft project. You can create your own search provider for your browser. After the {searchTerms} section you could add -facebook for your desired results.

I'd like to see something more flexible.

The open source issue tracker "Trac" has a nice syntax for its Query Language.

It uses date specifications like 1d (1 day), 4w (4 weeks), and 5y (5 years).

It'd be nice if DDG searches allowed you to include some date constraint in the same way Trac allows you constrain ticket queries.

I confirm that this is an issue even for single word excludes.

I've actually been experiencing it (since quite a bit ago) but couldn't find any information that would suggest that it is indeed broken.

This is incredibly frustrating when looking up results for queries involving Angular. Trying to exclude AngularJS entries simply doesn't work.

I believe this worked in the past: angular -angularjs. Running it now gives me the AngularJS' webpage as the first result.

See: DuckDuckGo results vs. StartPage results for the query: angular -angularjs

No problem.

Here's a list of downloads

And here's an FAQ

Oh it's not just your behavior that makes me think you're a troll. /u/ddguser100 is an account that's less than two days old. What, were you afraid the NSA might detect you're a duckduckgo user?

> Here is a screenshot showing instant search (or whatever you want to call it) in action as i type:

Ah, ok. We're talking about the autocomplete suggestions. You see, using the right words is actually quite important if you wish to be considered an intelligent human being (or "life form" as you so elegantly put it).

So yes, your searches are sent to ddg. The important thing is: ddg does not store any of this data. How do i, a person who apparently is more stupid that the seat you are at this moment sitting on, know this? Well, because, my bridge-dwelling friend, i have read the privacy policy:

> We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings. We use aggregate, non-personal search data to improve things like misspellings.

If you can prove that they save data on you, that means they have violated their privacy policy. You could sue them out of existence.

As for the redirect, see quote above. Please, i beg you, if you have hard evidence that ddg is storing data on me, do humanity a favor: Stop arguing with this random internet user who is just doing this for fun anyway, go do something productive with your life and sue ddg.

As a last remark: You, as a clearly brain-wise superior person, are aware that you can turn both of these thing of in the settings, right? autocomplete under "result" and redirects under "privacy".

Oh fine i'll reply. It's not like i got anything better to do and even though reason is clearly lost on you this information might be usefull for others. Might as well get some amusement out of a troll.

> DDG will search AS YOU TYPE YOUR SEARCH TERM.

Uh, no it doesn't? Do you even duck bro? Since you clearly have never used duckduckgo, allow me to help you with that. Go to https://duckduckgo.com/. Even you should be able to find the large search bar in the middle of the page (It's under the duck). Click this search bar and type something in. Is it searching yet? Nope, it waits untill you press "enter" (That's the big key to the right of you keyboard. It looks like an upside down "L").

Also, unlike you my dear troll, i actually do have some basic understanding of how the internet works. I also know how to use a search engine, which you have demonstrated not to be able to do. Kindly go to https://duckduckgo.com/privacy#s1 (This is achieved by clicking the blue text to the left of this one. We call this a "link".) Some text will appear in you browser. Please read this text.

I hope this information was usefull to someone. As for /u/ddguser100, thanks for the laugh buddy. I look forward to your reply.

Duly noted! We'll definitely think about an option for that. Right now, you can insert page numbers (where the results load more) but actual pages are only on our HTML and Lite versions

This new update is so good! I was still having to switch to Google when searching for images using the old version. With this version, i think I won't have to that very often.

Also with the support of those goodies (https://duckduckgo.com/goodies), DDG will be a strong alternative to Google. You win!

Thanks for letting us know! It seems like a bug with one of our sources--they're just providing the wrong regional result so we'll report and the fix should flow to us.

The setting is definitely working--as I can see it for other queries:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=leica+m9+r%3Auk

This is correct^^

A lot of times it's due to vandalism. Someone will go in and add/remove/change something on a page which then shows up in our results. In this case, it's just a little outdated on our end. I can see it no longer appears as an entry here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Social_bookmarking

You/re also right, in that, you can report those through the feedback form :)

https://old.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/

Might I suggest this? They even have DuckDuckGo set as the default search engine in Privates tabs.

https://brave.com/brave-and-duckduckgo-partner-to-improve-privacy-on-the-web/

I use mailbox.org. Based in Germany and costs 1€/month but supports encryption (e.g. by providing a service to encrypt all incoming messages with a public key you provide if I remember correctly; or by signing all messages they send to you) and respects you privacy. They have multple payment methods including bitcoin.

Not a direct answer, but maybe you would prefer Firefox Focus.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.focus

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-search-engine-firefox-focus-android

Use vanced youtube .....

It will not show any adds .!!

All the premium youtube features are available here..

vanced youtube

Link here☝️☝️ It will give you a nice experience..

the one intercepting the connection is NordVPN, the subreddit is flooding with identical screenshots and one thing they all have in common is they are using NordVPN or as i like to call it NordCreePN(say it aloud if you didnt get that joke).

Signal is good but I mainly use Wire as my family and friends like it better (especially on iPhone, Signal is really not as great as Android version). Also Wire have desktop and web version that doesn't require phone number, neither to have a smartphone at all. Wire is not exactly FOSS as it's a business running it but they have open sourced all their code now (if I'm right).

Anyway I use most of these services except Tresorit (I have a NAS that locally encrypt before backing up in the cloud) and Threema that I stopped using when my last contact on it installed Signal.

Brave is an interesting replacement for Chromium for me but Firefox stay my main browser.

And Protonmail, I'm using it with paid account for a long time, I mostly love it but there is always features missing. Also I have switch from PIA to ProtonVPN when they introduced their service.

Wait it is intended to protect for that? Seems like a hard task. I am a bit surprised since I thought duckduckgo was primarily a search engine.

Maybe they're just "helping a bit?" Not sure what the options for android-browsers are. A VPN probably a good idea?

I use a VPN and UMatrix, mainly. Still get 1/640K, 1/33K for respectively with/without UMatrix. Seems pretty fingerprintable. Think the only real solution is a "browser proxy", i.e. a proxy that emulates a browser entirely. Might also need a way for browsers to share what is behind redirects, so that browsers don't have to report where they're going.

Probably privacy badger is easier to use than UMatrix.

Man, you're splitting hairs and moving goal posts. You're wasting a lot of time with one click, and you're not wasting time by typing.

>But what if you wanted to search something on DGG after WolframAlpha? Then you have to go back to DGG. With google you're still in the search engine and you can do small calculations there while you're at it

So can DDG. I just did a long calculation. 12 + 9 - 7 x 47 / 3. Google can do that same thing.

#1: You can use !wa to send you to WolframAlpha, which is more powerful then any calculator outside of the TI line I've seen, and even works with basic Wikipedia info and can do calculations with that.

#3: You clearly selected 1 whole pizza for the DDG result, while you chose 1 slice for Google. Choosing the both for the engines gives the same result.

#5: I searched the same thing, and got a window about information about the guy..

#6 - 7: You can just click on those links and browse them. Where does Google get their data from? IMDB? RottenTomatoes? If you, you can use !imdb and/or !rt to spot if any movies either coming soon, or out already are any good by critics and the average Joe/Jane.

#8: With DDG, if you type in, for example, "bars near me" (without the quotes), it will give you a listing of the bars near you. Nothing too fancy, huh? But, it also orders them by Yelp reviews, highest to lowest. And it shows you a little map too, which is something Google doesn't do.

#9: You can also click on the first link for both engines to get the same results. I remember reading on the community forums someone is trying to implement this API to DDG.

I could go on. Your biggest issue here is that you don't want to click on anything. Do I use Google? Sure, sometimes. !g gives me an encrypted link, and stops Google tracking from my links. Win/win.

More details can be found on the (slightly outdated) URL parameters page. The settings page can also export a custom URL based on the current preferences (“Show Bookmarklet and Settings Data”.

kai=1 shows URLs above the text snippet

kf=-1 disables site icons

kz=-1 disables instant answers automatic display

k9=1a0dab title color

kx=006621 URL color

kj=f1f1f1 header background color

q= for easier set up in e.g. chrome, just add %s or {searchTerms} after this

I can answer this (sorry for just seeing it). The future is Instant Answers. We want that our community functions like the Wikipedia community ---> millions of folks creating, maintaining, and moderating Instant Answers for the topics/searches they know most about.

We believe that nearly every search can have an Instant Answer that gives you exactly what you're looking for like this but we'll need a large and involved community before we're able to confidently cover all searches, including the niche ones.

If we can inspire our community to take ownership of Instant Answers, then they can pilot the search engine into the future while we support them (you).

bangs normally return the result of a search for some site.

For example, !php returns the result of searching php.net, which is normally one of a large number of possible pages.

But, there's only one bang page: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

There aren't individual pages for different bangs (AFAIK).

So, your search could only have one possible result.

FWIW, your question helped me realise that I could do this for sites that don't have their own built in search - for this, I am grateful to you.

So if I'm understanding you correctly:

• asd in address bar -> !s asd to DuckDuckGo
• !foo asd in address bar -> !foo asd to DuckDuckGo

Right?

Also, which DDG addon are you using? There are several (Basic and Plus are official, plus some unofficial ones like FastestFox).

Whatever the case, I suspect you might be out of luck here. The DuckDuckGo extensions (last I checked) use Firefox's normal search bar interface for adding itself as a search engine, and said interface does little more than pass the search terms to https://duckduckgo.com/?q=$QUERY (where $QUERY is your search terms, like !s asd, with relevant input sanitization). I'm poking around in the DDG Plus extension's source to see if there's anything more that can be done, but it's not looking promising.

EDIT: you could, hypothetically, write up an extension that overrides Firefox's search/address bar functionality with regexps or something, seeing as how pretty much everything in Firefox is customizable, but I don't suspect that to be particularly easy unless you're already well-versed in Firefox modification, XUL, etc.

Nah, just because we think it should work :) i.e. most people would expect a !ddg to search DDG and so it does. If you're looking for purpose, you'll love the color picker

To answer the second part of your question, other web pages don't know how you got to the page when using DDG, and DDG does not store any information about you in cookies or on their servers. As a result DDG is one tool help provide you with better privacy, but it is not a magic bullet that well protect you anywhere you go on the internet.

One tool that can help with privacy is the Tor Project at https://www.torproject.org/ it will slow your browsing down a bit and even they admit that it isn't 100% fool prof but it is one good tool to help with your privacy.

I should note that my comment had a slight error.

!sr news is for /r/news, !news is for google news. In general you can visit any subreddit that exists with !sr, like

!sr ninja

Also there are too any instant answers to count and growing. You can even get bible verses returned.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bible+proverbs+27%3A15&amp;ia=answer

There used to be a pretty good instant answers page but they removed it.

Here's a github list though

https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/tree/master/lib/DDG/Goodie

Yes, some are available like:

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=palemoon&amp;q=images+falcon+tube&amp;ia=images

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=palemoon&amp;q=time+in+france&amp;ia=time

DDG uses !bangs for some solutions so, for example for cached web searches they have the !wayback bang. For example: !wayback digg.com which then allows the user to select the version they wish to view.

DDG's image search is still in development, some features not yet available.

In short, this particular Instant Answer pulls back posts from Product Hunt that match your search. What you're seeing in the example, is like seeing directly into Product Hunt's own data. Check this out:

their search results: http://www.producthunt.com/#!/s/posts/twitter

our search results: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=product+hunt+twitter&amp;ia=producthunt

If he just wants Google results, he can use https://www.startpage.com/ to get them without sacrificing his privacy. But its sad that your dad values his right to privacy so little..

On searching "automobile" I see an automobile.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=automobile

But is there a way to search without images being displayed?

Like search "flesh eating bacteria !noImg" so that I can read about flesh eating bacteria, without seeing gruesome things?

> https://swiftype.com/site-search

I was with you right up until "It's not free" - and my interest was definitely lost when I saw the 'Basic' subscription is just $299/month! Kudos for the suggestion, though.

Thank you! I really should have added that Monero "is one of the largest open-source teams in the world, and is in the top 2% of all project teams on Open Hub."

https://www.openhub.net/p/monero/factoids#FactoidTeamSizeVeryLarge

Which is then again based on Android, so you're still partially dependent on Google.

I'd really love to see more phones with a real independent OS like Sailfish or Plasma Mobile (which preferably do not come with an Android compatibility layer preinstalled).

Windows 10.

Duck Duck Go search engine.

odysee.com cannot be found by searching. I think it is because youtube is cancelling people and don't want them to find odysee and have a voice. Probably an issue with Google's search servers. Doesn't duck duck go use google internally?

Well the articles claiming that (businessinsider, lifehacker) are from 2013 and they only claim that they are selling the data that they get if you enable the "help improve ad detection" option. So while they might have stopped doing that (or never did in the first place) I wouldn't trust them again. I'm way more at ease using a completely open source too like uBo or Disconnect than a tool made by a company that has to have some way to pay their bills.

Thanks for the award. In addition there's two more that might also be more accurate: https://papago.naver.com/ (possibly the best for Asian languages?) and perhaps https://translate.yandex.com/ but I haven't used it that extensively.

First thing to do is to ditch the apple ecosystem as much as you can. I'm not saying you need to toss your MacBook and iphone, but moving to services that aren't locked behind a walled garden does a lot help you move down the line.

Safari --> Firefox

• in Firefox, keep extensions to a minimum as they increase attack surface. A couple of useful privacy enhancing extensions to use:

Facebook Container

Ublock origin

iMessage/Facebook Messenger --> signal(matrix if you can convince your friends/family to move, but as of current signal is more user friendly)

Dump Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. They are privacy nightmares and not safe.

Some might tell you that you need a VPN to protect your privacy. I'd add the caveat that it can help, but it doesn't fix it. It's a tool to use, not a solution.

If you have the resources, set up your own pihole server for DNS. If not, use a DNS provider that has a good privacy policy (applied privacy is pretty good, speed is iffy though).

Most important thing to remember though is that companies can change their values on a whim.

I think that feature is either automated or only partially working. For Proton mail, the DDGPE icon shows B+, which is supposed to be taken from https://tosdr.org/. But when you go there and look up protonmail.com, you see the B, not B+. But there is also lot of data about Proton mail there.

https://www.startpage.com/proxy/eng/help.html

Wow, I didn't know it was a thing! You should have provided the URL, too, because I did not believe you.

I see how it works now. Not really something I'd use day to day, maybe only to view questionable sites. ;)

I'm not super familiar with why this would be happening but my guess is that it's overwriting any non_default_search_engine so that if it sees a foreign search engine, it replaces with the default fallback.

For mobile, have you tried Dolphin browser or iCab Mobile ? DuckDuckGo is an available option there.

Hi. There are a couple of ways a website can track other websites you've visited.

1. When you visit a website by following a link, e.g. you click on a Wikipedia link, the website can see that you came from Wikipedia.
2. If a website you visit provides code to other websites, it could potentially track whether you visited those other websites. For example, Facebook provides the code for its "Like" button to other websites to use. If you click on the Like button within a blog, for example, Facebook could see that you visited that blog.

In terms of protection, the first case is part of how the web works so it's usually not possible to hide which site you clicked a link on. If you want to hide this, it's best to just copy the link and than paste it into the browser's address bar directly.

The second case is possible to block, especially if the third-part code (e.g. Like buttons) contain hidden trackers. That's what the DuckDuckGo app and extension try to do – block code that contains third-party trackers on websites you visit.

I hope that helps. By the way, for general privacy questions like this you may get better answers on the /r/privacy subreddit whereas this subreddit is better for DuckDuckGo-specific questions and feedback.

That sounds good if more that one parameter is necessary, but I find it easier to just use !w for english and !wes for spanish.

Aside from that, you might be interested in this add-ons if you use firefox:

https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/https-finder/

The first one "forces" ssl where it is available and the second one helps the first one in finding it and adding rules for specific sites.

No, Vivaldi is a competitor of Google in the browser space and like other browsers that are based on the open source Chromium, there's no connection with Google when using the browser.

EDIT: Actually they have this in their privacy policy: "Vivaldi integrates the Safe browsing API from Google, which checks the site you are visiting against a master list of known suspected phishing and malware sites. This feature can be turned off in the Privacy settings (Settings > Privacy > Privacy)."

Vivaldi (my default browser) is based on the Blink engine developed by the Chromium project, but doesn't use G's tracking. You can read Vivaldi's privacy statement here: https://vivaldi.com/privacy/browser/

Thank you for the response. :)

By the way, there was also something wrong with KK (enabling keyboard shortcuts). When my custom URL broke after the redesign, I tracked the problem down to this parameter—I’d had it set to L (just hide legend) but post-redesign, L disabled keyboard shortcuts instead. I changed it to KK=1 (enable keyboard shortcuts, display legend) which brought back keyboard shortcuts, but as mentioned in my other post, only J and K were working, not L or D, etc.

I just visited the URL Parameters page again and now I see KK is no longer listed. Does that mean keyboard shortcuts will be enabled without having to specify the parameter? I approve! The “show legend” / “hide legend” switch is superfluous now anyway since the redesign doesn’t even display a legend as far as I’m aware.

I think the best place to report it is Feedback.

The zero-click info is often pulled from Wikipedia, so Wikipedia may know that 2collab is defunct, but DuckDuckGo probably doesn't.

Have you tried boosting the results for your region, through the Settings menu: https://duckduckgo.com/settings.html ?

Also, after doing that, can you tell us which links are the most useful to you? What pages were you looking for?

AND is not the default for Google. https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=click+here gives you Adobe Reader as the first result, which does not have "click here" anywhere on the page.

See also: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=miserable+failure

• The front page and non-instant results pages at Google load faster for me. That's probably because I'm in Atlanta.

• https://duckduckgo.com/?q=3+feet+*+2+inches+in+square+centimeters loads the results from Wolfram Alpha via javascript, and sorta slowly. I think when I tried previously I may have closed the page in failure before the calculation results loaded. Perhaps I should just use the non-JS version of the site for more speed?

• Thanks for the shorter URL. I see it in the reddit sidebar now, but you might want to mention it somewhere [more prevalent, if it's buried] on your site.

To add the reddit homepage ( https://duckduckgo.com/tw/reddit ), create a search (any search) and go to the tab on the right hand corner that is level with the search bar that is labeled 'Settings' and select 'Interface' on the drop down menu. The second option is Twitter feed, at which you will see the Reddit feed is already a choice. Once you clicked that option, save and go to the home screen to see the Reddit feed.

Cool, thx. On images, here is our current status -- we're slated to work on that more in the medium term.

On videos, we should be showing videos in-line. What queries do you think they should also come up for?