DuckDuckGo moves beyond search to also protect you while browsing

Google started this really annoying habit of including results that don’t have the words you are searching. You can get around this by including the word in quotes but it’s frustrating to spend a few minutes looking items returned by Google to not find what you’re looking for to realize they showed it to you even though it didn’t have your search terms.<p>I bet this is great for current events like “when is Star Wars 1 playing” when the person probably meant Star Wars 8. But sucks when researching items or searching for a paper or particular product.<p>I started using Duck Duck Go and it works great. The privacy is an added bonus.

This is great! I have been waiting for an extension such as this which: (1) is seamless, (2) doesn&#x27;t break the web, (3) doesn&#x27;t require too much tweaking, and (4) is offered by a company I trust. Mainly in order to install on friends&#x27; and family&#x27;s devices who aren&#x27;t tech savvy – this appears to be exactly that. Thank you. Love the UX (sans below), nice touch integrating with ToS;DR.<p>Feedback: The &quot;enhanced from X to Y&quot; is not perfectly clear to me. I&#x27;m guessing you&#x27;re saying &quot;we were able to upgrade the rating to Y from X&quot;. Correct? The badge seems to be showing the upgraded rating rather than the &quot;actual&quot; rating – this is not what I expected. I expected to see the privacy grade of said website, not the grade received by blocking scripts and&#x2F;or redirecting to https.<p>Question: Will the extension for Safari be available from the Safari Extensions Gallery[1]? This would be even better, avoiding (said friends and family) having to &quot;Trust&quot; the safariextz and get the disclaimer that it isn&#x27;t from the gallery. (I currently only see your old search extension in the gallery, will they, perhaps, be merged?)<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;safari-extensions.apple.com&#x2F;?q=duckduckgo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;safari-extensions.apple.com&#x2F;?q=duckduckgo</a>

Use DuckDuckGo every day, but wish it had a date range of one year as a search filter like google, needed for programming searches where the landscape changes rapidly...

I applaud the initiative, but how does the Firefox extension differ from Privacy Badger or Disconnect?<p>Does the extension learn trackers as it goes, like Privacy Badger? What does it offer over something like uBlock Origin with the appropriate tracking blocklists?<p>Also in Firefox, I now have two &quot;Search DuckDuckGo&quot; entries in the right click menu, one from being the default search engine, and one (with an icon) from the extension. They do the exact same thing, so why have them both?

Let me use this thread to lazily look for simple advice.<p>For privacy, I&#x27;m now using: DuckDuckGo Plus, First Party Isolation, Smart Referer, HTTPS Everywhere, uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Canvas Defender and Decentraleyes. There&#x27;s also NoScript installed, but disabled (waiting for its clickjacking protection to return in WebExt version, although I might switch back to whitelisting JS sometime). Plus there&#x27;s also Firefox&#x27;s Tracking Protection enabled all the time.<p>Anything worth adding? Anything that can be removed for sure, cause it just duplicates something else from this list? Anything should be replaced? (if yes, then why?)

If you&#x27;re interested in this, I suggest the new web browser Brave. It does a great job of cleaning up all the ads &amp; protecting your privacy. I also haven&#x27;t ran into sites that block me yet like I do when using an ad blocker on Chrome. You can choose the search engine you want to use unlike this extension. It&#x27;s also built on top of the same code as Chrome so you get all those benefits as well. Brendan Eich (JavaScript &amp; Mozilla) is the CEO.<p>Slightly off topic, Brave also has an interesting feature as well to help support content creators. Since a lot of content creators rely on ads, you have the ability to add a small amount of funds to a crypto wallet that Brave can use which get distributed to the websites you visit the most over the month. You can enable or disable this for specific websites as well. I think this is a great idea but it may have a hard time catching on. I think people will have a hard time adding money to a virtual wallet to pay for something they &quot;think&quot; they are already getting for free. At the same time I love the concept as it is a way for you to reward people for good content &amp; create a disincentive for bad content.

DDG as a search engine is just good. Its been my default for a long time. I wish Mozilla would make it the default so more users could be introduced to it. Why hasn&#x27;t this happened yet?

I&#x27;m using DuckDuckGo every day, but I wish DuckDuckHack was easier to contribute to. Maybe something like letting users load their own modules for local use, and public repositories? I&#x27;d like to help improve instant answers and widgets (like json pretty print).

Are the apps and browser extensions 100% open source? I didn&#x27;t notice anything in the text, but _maybe_ <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;duckduckgo&#x2F;duckduckgo-privacy-extension" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;duckduckgo&#x2F;duckduckgo-privacy-extension</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;duckduckgo&#x2F;Android" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;duckduckgo&#x2F;Android</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;duckduckgo&#x2F;iOS" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;duckduckgo&#x2F;iOS</a> have the complete source code?

Are people mostly positive about this? I was already using DDG - then I get an unexpected pop up asking for permission to rewrite everything. I think we should develop a reflex to routinely refuse to give popups permission - so now I&#x27;ve lost DDG in the search bar.<p>I would much rather that it stayed as a non-evil search provider rather than bundling ABP&#x2F;Ghostery. Maybe I&#x27;m in a minority wanting separation of concerns?<p>Or maybe it really is better than ABP and Ghostery and I&#x27;ve missed it by being put off by the delivery mechanism?

Edit - Chrome only issue for which the devs don&#x27;t have good options.<p>I was very disappointed to discover that the app <i>forces</i> you to use DDG for search. In Chrome there doesn&#x27;t appear to be a way to use Google as your default search engine while the extension is active. I like its other features but Google search IMO is <i>much much</i> better than DDG and don&#x27;t want to be forced to switch.

Improving privacy is great, but I find the extreme approach to erase all history taken by DuckDuckGo and others make them difficult to adopt.<p>I often use the history feature to re-find sites I remember visiting before. Bookmarks don&#x27;t solve this problem because even if I tried to remember to bookmark anything that might be important later, I wouldn&#x27;t be able to nor would I always be able to make that judgement accurately.<p>So, what I like to have instead of the nuclear option (erase all history) is a browser that protects my identity but also my history (e.g. behind a locked gate) that I can use always without having to think about so I don&#x27;t have to choose between privacy or history.

I like the grade system. Sometimes I’m amazed to see the number on my uBlock icon skyrocketing.<p>It’s cool to know where not to go if you can avoid it

I was curious about the &quot;fake&quot; site they used in their example, creepysite.com. I was pretty surprised to find that it redirects to google.com by an HTTP 302 redirect.<p>Good marketing for duckduckgo.

Very interesting.<p>I wonder how DDG&#x27;s new privacy tools compare to uBlock and Brave.<p>The Terms of Service; Didn&#x27;t Read [0] project is super cool. Looks like their information is a bit dated though. Hopefully teaming with DDG will give them a boost.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tosdr.org&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tosdr.org&#x2F;index.html</a>

Ukraine region not available any more: while &quot;ua-uk&quot; URL parameter is still mentioned on search params page[1], it&#x27;s not working. I didn&#x27;t get the answers on DDG forum (now closed in favor of reddit), neither on &#x2F;r&#x2F;duckduckgo. I suspect this could be connected somehow to Yandex block. Anyway, currently can&#x27;t use DDG for local search, sad :(<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;params" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;params</a>

Just came here to say that I’ve been using duckduckgo for the past year and absolutely love it. Keep up the wonderful work.

I&#x27;m concerned that I&#x27;d be handing over data about my browsing habits to DDG and its partners in order to use some of the features described in the article:<p>- The Privacy Grade rating (A-F) when visiting a website.<p>- Scoring of websites in terms of service and privacy, by partnering with Terms of Service Didn&#x27;t Read.<p>I&#x27;m not sure how these services can be provided by DDG and its partners without them knowing which websites I&#x27;m browsing to.<p>IMO, it&#x27;s none of their business, even if they promise not to keep the data or give&#x2F;sell it to anyone -- a promise which is not verified by any trusted third party, as far as I know.

Installed the iOS app and figured they would offer a content blocker for iOS Safari, just like Firefox Focus do. But their app didn&#x27;t offer any.<p>Let&#x27;s hope they do in the future.

@yegg, is DuckDuckHack coming back?<p>That was one of my first forays into open source and was hoping that there is more that I (and the community) can do to help improve DDG further.

What is the advantage of this over Firefox Focus? And is the Privacy Essentials extension available for Firefox for Android? Trying to understand why I should use the DDG app over either of those two, since the DDG app seems like it is just a browser without tab functionality.<p>Also, not really related, but does anybody know how to make the home screen search bar on Nexus&#x2F;Pixel phones use DDG instead of Google?

I&#x27;ve been using DuckDuckGo for a few months since I switched to the new Firefox. It&#x27;s generally OK but I can tell that the results are just ever so slightly worse than Google. I get irrelevant results and old results. It&#x27;s just obviously not nearly as smart and that&#x27;s probably because it doesn&#x27;t know as much about me as Google does.

what i _really_ dislike from Google is how they offer downgraded UI&#x27;s to non-Chrome browsers like firefox on android.<p>so no &#x27;tools&#x27; to specify filters, and no &#x27;Related images&#x27; in image search.<p>i looked why this was and its apparently intentional. brr.. evil :)

This gives my (personal) site a &quot;B&quot;, but literally the only thing it &quot;fails&quot; is that it doesn&#x27;t have a privacy policy listed at the (third party) site &quot;ToS;DR&quot;.<p>My site is a personal site, doesn&#x27;t have logins, and doesn&#x27;t even have any Javascript, so I think the &quot;B&quot; is a little misleading.<p>(Side note: Amusingly, if you go to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tosdr.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tosdr.org</a> with the plugin installed, they also fail for apparently not having a privacy policy listed on their own site. Also it says in a very large font that their ratings are outdated, so I really don&#x27;t know how useful this is.)

How does this differ from Disconnect or Ghostery?

Generally I am positive about this but I&#x27;d have to give some feedback that tag containers&#x2F;managers are not automatically bad.<p>At the moment it seems like this tool just flags tag containers (e.g. tagcommander, google tag manager) as a &quot;tracker network&quot; which they are not. Of course, a tag container might contain tracking beacons and tags etc but they might also contain benign other scripts (e.g. for A&#x2F;B testing).<p>I would prefer it if these sorts of tools blacklisted the tags <i>inside</i> the container (they are just loaded via ajax like everything else), rather than the containers themselves.

This is blocking Google Analytics, Facebook Connect and New Relic on my site. How would DuckDuckGo prefer that startups measure traffic, ad ROI and site performance? What&#x27;s the &quot;right&quot; way?

I miss Alta Vista and all the operators you could add to your queries.

My biggest frustration with search engines is that certain websites I consider bad are common in results. These include sites that require a login to use properly (Pinterest and Quora) as well as websites that are known to have wrong information (W3Schools).<p>What I’d like to have is an option in my search engine (ideally that would not require a login) to always exclude certain domains from results.<p>That would improve my browsing experience more than any other feature. Blocking trackers is something others are already doing well.

I see that the DuckDuckGo app is retiring stories. I am sad about this as I really liked the mix of articles it would provide.<p>@yegg, any chance of a stories-only spin-off app?

To prevent suffering from tyranny of small decisions[1], I want to support duckduckgo, financially and technically. Do they take donation? Or do they have an open sets of challenge to work on? Would love to help.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tyranny_of_small_decisions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tyranny_of_small_decisions</a>

I don&#x27;t like the fact that the browser combines the search bar and the address bar.<p>It means that when I enter a URL character by character, the search engine will know where I am going next even thought I didn&#x27;t need the assistance of a search engine in the first place.<p>A &quot;privacy first&quot; browser can do better in this regard.

Duckduckgo improved drastically over the last 6-7 years. I have no idea how they did it, but they did a great job.

Very cool... Some areas for improvement I noticed off the bat while using the app:<p>* Scrolling sometimes feels slow.<p>* Doesn&#x27;t seem to work with 1 password autofill. Not sure if 1password, DuckDuckGo, or both are needed to address this.<p>* Would be nice to be able to use Google as a search engine (though I admit I could just go to google.com first).

This isn&#x27;t really a big deal, but the features they are touting as new &quot;today&quot; have been in the FF version of the extension for at least the month or so I&#x27;ve had it installed. I&#x27;m honestly curious if I&#x27;m missing something or not.

To block trackers I use Brave on my phone and Chrome + uBlock Origin on desktop.<p>I just checked this extensions and seems that they put a lot of attention on UX, I loved it and is all in one product, I like the vision of DDG.<p>Someone knows if the blocking part is as good as uBlock and Brave?

Kind of interesting seeing some of the ratings. Like Mozilla and HN have a B because of unknown privacy practices. Both these websites are fairly old, and it seems odd to me that the privacy practices of Mozilla are unknown.

How does the Safari extension play with the native content blockers like 1blocker? Is this supported? I noticed that with 1blocker enabled, the initial grade is usually higher than what it would be without 1blocker.

Maybe it&#x27;s just a semantic argument because I am a search engine developer, but I wouldn&#x27;t really call DDG a &quot;search engine&quot;. It uses Bing to power results. I would describe it as a &quot;search interface&quot; that gives you advanced search related tools in addition to standard search, some stratified results, and then it takes a privacy angle to differentiate itself. As such, I think the move to browser safety is a natural extension of what they do.<p>That said, how the heck do they make money? I only very rarely see a single ad, and there isn&#x27;t much money in NOT tracking people. It&#x27;s very hard to make money on search if you aren&#x27;t Google (I would know, I have tried several times).

Is it worth the switching costs of going from google to duckduckgo?

I use a pi-hole on my network so I think that achieves most of the things this extension offers (minus the site rating thing)<p>I use DDG as my main search engine though, and will continue to do so.

Choice is good. Big fan of Google and use a lot as super curious person but if does not work for you good there are other choices that work for your needs.

Here is a list of G operators <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goo.gl&#x2F;jYQk2t" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goo.gl&#x2F;jYQk2t</a>

Won&#x27;t using ToS;DR alienate smaller services that are not listed there? I only see reasonably big sites on their site.

I really do like the design of the post-install splash page. The vista scene reminds me of the firefox post install page.

I installed DuckDuckGo on my android in order to have a DuckDuckGo search widget and now it&#x27;s replaced with a laggy browser.<p>smh

moving to DDG right now. and it&#x27;s done

creepysite.com<p>... used in their screenshot as an example, so funny that creepysite.com actually does redirect to google.com :D

Very happy to see the improvements. Personally I stopped feeling comfortable on using search engines across the Atlantic since about a decade.<p>In case you&#x27;d be living around Europe, <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qwant.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qwant.com</a> is picking up the pace here as a search engine focused on privacy-aware users.<p>As an engineer, the service is answering quite well to my queries related to software.

Is the TOSDR data included with the add-on and referenced offline or is every URL being sent to TOSDR?

Was there any truth to the Russia-DDG connection rumor going around the internet a few years back?

At the moment I use uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, NoScript. Can this addon replace all of these?

Does the DDG addon replace other addons like HTTPSEverywhere or uBlock?

Can&#x27;t use 1Password on the iOS app. Deal breaker.

Whenever I try to put back the search engine that I use as Chrome toolbar search engine it uninstall the app.<p>Edit: Quick support made me change my wording to a less passive aggressive one.

This is awesome.

Good. Glad to see DDG keeps moving forward.

Please put the install links at the top.

Saw you guys on Product Hunt!!

Is nobody here aware of&#x2F;concerned by DDG ownership&#x27;s previous endeavors?

&quot;Install an arbitrary piece of code on your machine to improve your privacy.&quot;<p>Note that there is no link to the source code, no checksum. There&#x27;s no indication that DDG isn&#x27;t doing exactly what they claim to be protecting against. And the question comes up: what do they stand to gain from having users install a mobile app on their phone?

I&#x27;m not sure I understand what value DDG is providing exactly.<p>I use Bing with cookies and JS disabled. DDG on the other hand can&#x27;t be used with JS disabled.<p>Before you say that privacy is about cookies and JS has no bearing in it, think that Google for example uses all kinds of JS to gather information about your browser. That&#x27;s extra datapoints that they gather about you.