NO.

1. it is US-based
2. the CEO is the former founder of the “Names Database”

for the love of god, use anything but DDG. Qwant is EU-based and has decent results, SearX is another one which lets you choose between instances (or host your own).

please stop taking US “privacy” services seriously. i was hoping people would know better on here, compared to reddit

DDG was known as the best option for search engines but then they started talking of censoring stuff and also it has Microsoft trackers and other problems. Yes, it is still better than Google, Bing and Yandex when talking of privacy but with search engines like Qwant and specially SearX (SearXNG) there's no reason to use DDG over these.

What's wrong with startpage.com?

Honestly yeah. There's been some controversies in the past, but for someone who's looking for a zero-effort way to browse privately and support the privacy scene (DDG donates a lot of money) it's a great choice. Wouldn't recommend their browser/extensions though

Hell yeah. I consider myself privacy paranoid and have been using DuckDuckGo for 5 years without any problems so far. It is pretty strict about its privacy policy.

It’s better than google, and so it’s a good start.

DDG still spies on you. It still better than google, i guess, but i personaly use disroot's searx

Didn't DDG get caught allowing some Microsoft tracking and blocking some search results a couple of years back? Personally I use Firefox and starpage as a search engine.

I recently started using Kagi. The search result are super good, and no ads. You do have to pay tho. Another good one I like is presearch. Both of these have their own crawler, unlike most other search engines which rely on bing or Google.

I ditched it after it dropped the operators like quotes, "OR", "AND", and "-" which hampers it's usefulness to me.

I use it everywhere but the search results are... variable. However it's plenty good enough for most situations.

I still switch back to Google if I'm not finding what I want (using DDG's !g keyword, which is pretty helpful - just add that anywhere in a search and it'll send you to Google), but at least I'm only doing that when I'm aware of it.

For those who still don’t know and find DDG’s name too long to type out than google, you can just input duck.com and it will redirect you to DDG!

Its shady for many reasons... I quit using it

I read an article on tor about the problems with many "privacy respecting" search engines, including ddg, here: https://digdeeper.club/articles/search.xhtml