I’ve recently learned that DDG does not follow its own guidelines for privacy. I’m curious what search engines people here would recommend. I would prefer a search engine that not only respects my privacy but also doesn’t hide or shadow ban content it doesn’t like. Any recommendations?
I suspect that maybe you were exposed to a certain post over on lemmy.ml @ local link: https://lemmy.one/post/657560
I’d invite you to read through my comment deconstructing the silliness of that entire post…the accusations and links are highly flimsy and poorly support the assertions being made. https://lemmy.one/comment/708741
I won’t deny that it’s likely that DDG isn’t as privacy focused today as it may have been when it was initially founded; but I haven’t seen anything on the fediverse compile enough reasons today that would support the panic I’m seeing over it if you just look into what few sources are quoted and being used and assess critically what might be going on.
That being said…
I do recommend SearXNG. Highly.
The metasearch engine that SearXNG offers usually works well and allows you to pick, choose, and sift through the various search engines and even define and create new ones you can use for yourself so that you can easily search whatever you need.
Searx instances in general are kinda like email providers too; just find a good one for yourself and start using it; no real account is required…just find one that works for you and set up your preferences and all.
I do not recommend Kagi! Kagi is a paid search engine. In general I do not consider their paid service to be better than Searx and would not recommend using them. Usage of a paid service requires creating an account…and we all know where that garden path lies.
Some thoughts from a long term SearXNG user: While I really appreciate how privacy respecting SearXNG is I had a lot of trouble with it. Often enough you get 0 results because of timeouts with the search engines it uses and sometimes the order of the presented search results isn’t good. Sometimes the thing I’ve been searching for was the 10th result while in other search engines it was the first result. So the prioritizing of the results is often enough just odd.
We live in a time where there are so many search engines but all of them have their flaws. It’s really frustrating. :(
I recommend finding a different instance then. Not every instance is going to be great at it, and you do have to do a lot of fiddling around with preferences and be-bopping between various instances when the current instance is timing out.
…Or you could just hit F5 and try your search query again. For some reason that seems to work sometimes. It is possible to configure an instance to not get slammed; and you can host one yourself too
The problem is that it doesn’t matter which instance I use. I tried multiple instances, even self-hosted one myself. Sooner or later I always had the problem with timeouts (even with my self-hosted local instance) and it’s so damn annoying. Even refreshing the page doesn’t always help. I really don’t feel like hopping from instance to instance just because my preferred instance has timeouts again. Reliability is crucial to me.
Did you check the preferences on the instance and change the default engine selections? You can check the engines and de-select engines that are turning out to be unreliable with results; which should result in fewer errors.
Of course I did. The thing is that the reliability of the search engines per instance varies from time to time so there’s not a single instance that will always work perfectly and never has timeouts.
I just want to say as a Kagi user I like it a lot. I don’t need to search anything weird, and my search history doesn’t describe acting about my persona I wouldn’t say on my own anyway… many I should be more worried? Not sure, but I believe they don’t track or sell info.
Not sure, but I believe they don’t track or sell info. Doubt they need to with their paid subscription. Though I can’t justify buying Kagi since I barely search anything in of itself.
THat is correct. I appreciate the clarity :).
As for SearXNG, you need a means to host an instance of that as well as a domain yeah?
You can find many public hosted instances here but some of them use Cloudflare because they fear DDoS attacks. So keep that in mind when choosing your instance. Best is to host your own instance.
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You can host your own, but you can also find a public instance.
Care to elaborate about DDG? If this is about the Bing thing from last year, that was almost entirely FUD.
How is sending user data to Microsoft’s ad tracking service FUD? That’s exactly what privacy preserving browsers are supposed to stop.
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Every search engine “censors” results. That is literally their job.
Yeah. Every search engine makes a decision about what to show to you and in what order; it’s simply not possible to show you everything with equal priority. This means no search engine offers a truly neutral search, there can always be bias in it.
The only thing I’d worry about over other search engines was if Duck Duck Go was systematically removing search results based on keywords, like if they were trying to make it never show results about the Holocaust or Tienanmen Square or so on even when those are explicitly searched for, or to only show results on certain topics from a tiny handful of selected sources. But I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest Duck Duck Go is doing this.
Yes, exactly, thank you.
Different search engines will “censor” different results to bring you whatever is, in their opinion, the most relevant information to your inquiry. That’s their job. To sort the nonsense from the relevant info.
How is sending user data to Microsoft’s ad tracking service FUD? That’s exactly what privacy preserving browsers are supposed to stop.
Link to the Lemmy post in question: https://lemmy.one/post/657560
Ultimately, it seems like the post doesn’t provide adequate evidence to prove its claims about DDG.
Kagi, searxng
Kagi is slept on for sure
I’ve come around on paying for email (proton mail), but still in the air about paying for search.
Trust me, it’s worth it
Startpage (basically a proxy for Google afaik), Murena Spot, SearX, Qwant, SwissCows
I use Qwant and Startpage for most things, but tend towards Qwant due to speed.
I primarily use Startpage for image search, though, because you can specify exact resolutions.
In my phone Murena Spot was always the default search engine and it’s fine. I switch between it and Qwant Lite.
When I want someone to search more privately without getting different results, I always recommend Startpage.
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Can you elaborate?
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I’ll take a look, thank you! I had actually looked into SearX but it seemed like it required some additional setup. I’ll check Startpage and Qwant though!
That is weird… Point taken
depends on your usecase, some people actually prefer the extreme filters it has to make content family friendly
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SearXNG, there’s nothing much else to say.
If it is software how do you know who has implemented it and whether the instance respects privacy?
Self-host yourself is the safest option, I do.
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I’m running it on a remote server.
I used to use https://metager.org/ as my engine. Although they also have a german version with metager.de which is what I personally used, since it’s my native language.
Though I’ve just personally switched to Startpage as my engine.
Primarily Brave, on the odd occassion I might have to check Startpage, but Startpge seems to have a suspicious deal with Google, also Startpage requires a verification process if it detects a VPN or Tor.
SearX can be nice, but being an open search platform, the results can be wildly random bases on which instance of SearX you search on.
I ended up just hosting my own Searxng instance. Seems a lot easier to control and not be dependent on how someone else has theirs set up.
Self hosting is always te best way to operate any service.
You can use LibRedirect extension which switches you instance of searxng on every search, this maximizes your privacy.
I would prefer a search engine that not only respects my privacy but also doesn’t hide or shadow ban content it doesn’t like.
The biggest search engine with its own index that cares about your privacy is Mojeek. A lot of “search engines” are actually proxies for other search engines, as Mojeek explains here: https://blog.mojeek.com/2013/10/crawler-based-search-engine.html
This is important, because if the main search provider for these proxies refuses to show results in its index, then every proxy is also affected.
Mojeek was actually the first search engine to have a no-tracking privacy policy, going as far back as 2006: https://www.mojeek.com/about/privacy/
I switch public instances from SearXNG and if I really want google results, I go to Whoogle.
Did qwant become better in the recent time? I tried it a few years back and the search results were meh
I use Brave Browser’s search engine, however the results are less than ideal compared to a big company like Google and I don’t care for the AI generated information paragraph when looking up a topic as the first result. The only real private search engine is searx afaik.
Startpage (basically a proxy for Google afaik), Murena Spot, SearX, Qwant, SwissCows
I primarily use the first two but the rest works great, too
