Hi everyone,
I’m choosing a default search engine and I’m torn between DuckDuckGo and Brave Search. What matters most to me:
Privacy: what’s actually logged, and can the claims be trusted? Independence from Big Tech: DDG partly relies on Bing, while Brave has its own index. Result quality: relevance for daily, technical and niche queries. Trust: track record, controversies, business model.
Which one do you use daily, and why? Have you noticed a real quality difference? Thanks!
I’ve been using DDG as my default for probably longer than I ever used Google, so I’ll share my thoughts on it
What I like:
What I don’t like:
They’ve had controversies in the past, but I’ve not heard of any in recent years tbh
How does this work? I mean how decides it is Ai slop or not?
Known sources, digital watermarks, and user-contributed reporting.
I see. Well that makes sense and is indeed useful then.
Note, I have only seen filters for the image search. But there’s definitely a lot of slop among the images even though you select to exclude slop. There’s just so much slop out there I guess.
I view this comparable to an ad-blocker extension in the browser. It doesn’t block all ads, but it does a decent job that the result is usable. Maybe that is the effect, maybe less. As long as they do not heuristic decision and only go about known stuff, then I’m all for it. My first thought was “oh they fight ai with ai”, but that is not the case as it seems. But it depends on the sources for that filter. If they use Ai to detect, then I’m not a big fan of the filter.
Indeed. Note also that I’m only certain about the user reporting, as I’ve done some reporting of my own. I stopped after a while though. There’s so much that it feels futile.
But, the other ways of determining should be possible too.
For LLM I use open-websearch which supports a ton of search engines