What would you prefer? Anonymous payments? And regardless of payment method, how would you avoid creating an account to tie the payment to?

Payment via digital gift cards sold on Amazon, e.g. Mullvad

Granted, this would probably be a very miniscule amount of their users.

That's not how businesses process payment. Any responsible finance department will call a hard no on that. (And from a consumer side, asking to pay with a gift card is usually a huge red flag that a scam is incoming)

I believe they mean a gift card for their service, as in they should offer gift cards. Not send us $50 worth of Google Play gift cards.

https://www.amazon.com/Mullvad-VPN-Devices-Protect-Security/...

Yep

This Valentine's Day, give someone the true gift of love, a search.

Yes, as a paid service who directly sells their primary product rather than a data mining, anti-privacy homunculus whose most famous product is merely a means to an end, an account and payment is required. This is strictly better than Google.

Your goals are mutually exclusive.

DuckDuckGo is 100% privacy focused, free, and doesn’t require an account or credit card to use.

They are privacy focused in as much as they don't track you themselves, they just hand you off to Microsoft to be tracked.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/ddg-microsoft-tracking-blo...

Their founder is also on record as "down ranking misinformation", which is not a judgment call I want my search engine making. Relevance and truth are two different things.

> Their founder is also on record as "down ranking misinformation"

https://mashable.com/article/duckduckgo-search-engine-russia...

Also here, straight from the horse's mouth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33247856

The sketchy and indirect way they engage with this criticism put me off of ever trusting DDG.

Thanks!

If you are into self-hosting, I hear Searx is pretty good. Been thinking on setting that up on my personal server so I can just stop relying on companies

The problem is DuckDuckGo is very USA and English focused. I've switched to it myself long ago, but it's very frustrating when I search for things and it brings up American shops higher than anything else. I'm not going to 5,000km to go shopping. You move out of English it's even worse. For general tech searching it's on par with Google. But if you are looking for things locally I often find the need to switch back to Google.

It has a location toggle at the top of the results page. It works fine for me, and I’m not from an English-speaking country.

Yes, and it's not as good.

Are you sure about the credit card? I signed up without one. There is a free option.

Cool. Continue using Google then.