I am sure there is a good reason for this. I am looking for alternatives to google, and these to be the ones that pop-up most often.
For me it’s mostly cause of this asshole.
A few separate reasons usually sit behind that recommendation:
- Track record. DDG has been around since 2008 with the same simple model: ads matched to the search term, not to a profile of you. Brave Search only launched in 2021.
- Trust in the company. Brave’s browser was caught in 2020 quietly adding its own affiliate codes to some crypto exchange URLs, and its ad model is tied to its own token. Plenty of people never forgave that. DDG had its own stumble in 2022 (its browser allowed some Microsoft trackers under a search deal, since reversed), so neither is spotless.
- It works anywhere. DDG is just a search engine you can set in any browser; Brave Search is often conflated with the Brave browser.
The point in Brave’s favour is independence: it runs its own index, while DDG’s results mostly come from Bing. If that matters most to you, Brave Search or Mojeek is the better pick. For someone just starting to de-google, either one is a big step up, and the browser and the accounts you stay logged into matter more than which of the two you choose.
Brave is a crypto bro sham that blocks external ads just to insert their own
Meaning? Do they force you to use crypto services? In my time using them I have not encountered ads.
This answer makes this post feel less like a question and more like an ad.
No, and you can turn them off in settings. I use brave browser. No one is perfect, you gotta pick and choose what is acceptable to you or not when getting into the prigsfy/security realm. If you try to find perfection, you won’t.
For search, I use kagi. I love it. Worth the couple of bucks a month IMO. Free to try with some amount of searches a month on the free plan so you can just go fuck around and see if it is worth it for you too
I haven’t heard of kagi, might try it out. Although it being paid might be a dealbreaker…
Remember if you are not paying with money, you are the product being sold.
I switched to Kagi a few years ago and I’m not going back. It’s amazing how it’ll just give you the result with zero ads or SEO shit.
You can even downrank specific sites just for you (fuck Pinterest)
Fair reaction, but dont knock it til you try it
Waterfox is the AI-free way to go.
I do not want to be vilified for saying this, so I will echo what everyone else seems to be suggesting of DDG being a good degoogled search engine.
When I started to degoogle, personally do not remember what I was using DDG and ecosia probably. I hear ecosia has jumped into the AI game which I think is icky for what they are trying to do.
I later started getting into home labbing. I am in no way suggesting that you should jump into that right now, this is a rather expensive lifestyle, it starts with one project and you think oh fun what can I replace next? So the search engine I use now is searXNG, which I have set to pull from Bing, wikiepedia, and a bunch of smaller engines. I am just trying to say there are options for you to look into in the future. Not right now you are just getting out of the Google ecosystem
I always recommend https://noai.duckduckgo.com/%s because I’m trying to find results without AI/LLM. Nearly all search engines, including Brave, have AI results as a default. Sure, I can disable the AI results in the engine’s settings but it’s reset the next time I open my browser.
I prefer Startpage out of all of them, but lately been using Kagi’s APi along side my SearXNG instance and the experience has been quite enjoyable.
