As asked.
I recommend startpage.com over duckduckgo. It provides at least the same privacy as DDG while having generally better results because it uses google’s results instead of bing’s.
Edit: The ultimate search engine though, as mentioned by macattack, is SearxNG because it combines privacy with every other search engine and even allows you to mix and match your result sources.
With all the SEO garbage, are G**gle results still relevant? I haven’t used it in years for anything serious.
Start page was purchased by an ad company a while ago
this would change everything. you know more details about this one?
This was over 4 years ago now.
If you use your search engine of choice that isnt owned by an ad company (lol) there are a bunch of results for it.
Here’s one to get you started
Startpage is owned by a advertising company and closed source. wouldnt really recommend it
I also like startpages’ anonymous viewer
My first choice is actually Kagi these days. I pay for my search provider to have some peace of mind that my search provider isn’t selling me.
I got it not too long ago, and I love it. The results are good, and the features are what i wish all search engines had. Just not looking forward to when they sell to venture capatilists down the line, and everything becomes terrible.
In the meantime, everyone should check out their Small Web intiative. Gives you a random blog or small website. There’s some really good articles I would have never read otherwise.
I have also discovered very interesting blogs or site that I have then added to my RSS feed. They also offer a lens to only look within the small web, which they index themselves I think.
Just not looking forward to when they sell to venture capatilists down the line, and everything becomes terrible.
Judging by their ethos so far, I don’t think that’s a goal. I’d almost say it’s a non-goal.
I hope you’re right, but there’s plenty of well meaning projects and people that saw a large amount of money being offered and blinked.
I used to pay for kagi, but their CEO have some opinions that I absolutely hate about how to handle some issues, and this was a deal breaker for me. Nowadays I’m using searxng
What opinions can I ask? first time I’ve heard this
They announced a few months ago that they would partner with Brave to surface Brave search results too. The CEO of Brave is known to be homophobic. People got mad, and Kagi’s response was that they are too small to be picky, and have to focus on search quality.
And theres the issue someone opened on their page suggesting to include a special card on suicide related searches telling people how to find help, and the CEO dismissed saying it can be just someone curious making the search and he don’t want to “set a precedent” on showing things the user is not actively searching
I… think I agree with that though.
I’m not saying there isn’t a grey area between being socially conscious or full blow libertarian, but I do think that a search engine operates much better when it is unrestricted by societal qualms.
Look how stunted ChatGPT becomes with each new rendition, or how SDXL is far more restrictive in what it can express compared to its earlier SD1.5 models.
And also, like, their partnership with one of the most immoral companies on this planet drive most of the search results quality from the very beginning (Google). You didn’t sign up for a morally perfect search engine.
When people made such a huge fuss about the CEO of some minor index that Kagi also happens to use beside like 10 others being a douche, all I could do is shake my head.
does kagi spit out location-relevant information? that’s something I’ve really missed on startpage, I like being able to just google “chinese food” and have the restaurants near me spit back out, and if a privacy-centered search engine can return a result comparable to something like google there that’d make me real happy
Nope. For that I use the bang shortcut feature to send it to Google.
One nice thing about that, is that you can use
gas a bang, instead of!g. It’s a little thing but easier to type on mobile.There is a map search mode that does surface location aware results, after explicitly getting your permission to get your location.
Kagi does not request location permission; it uses network location (IP geo lookup).
So this is confusing. I did not know about the maps mode (thanks @randomperson@lemmy.today!). If you show the map and then press the “target” symbol to get your location, Kagi will prompt to enable geolocation.
When using a regular search for “chinese food near me” I see results for a city thousands of km away. But if I select Maps first, then it shows my local area and I can search on the map.
Oh, yes indeed. Map mode would request accurate geolocation.
When using a regular search for “chinese food near me” I see results for a city thousands of km away.
Yeah, that’s an unfortunate reality of IP geolocation, it’s not very accurate to begin with and can be extremely inaccurate in some cases too.
Does Google (without a login) have the same issue with your public IP?Perhaps when a location query is detected Kagi could show a little button to use accurate geolocation instead. They seem to be pretty on top of little UX issues like these, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they implemented a solution like that if you opened a feedback thread.
They use approximate network location for such requests, yes.
“chinese food” didn’t trigger it for me which is understandable since it’s a generic term, not a request to show chinese food restaurants near you but “chinese food near me” does show restaurants in my approximate vicinity as expected aswell as localised search results for tripadvisor.
In their privacy policy they claim that that’s explicitly the only time they use data that could be considered sensitive in a search request.
I self-host searXNG, but you can use one of the public instances as well. My understanding is that it is more secure because you’re search results are commingled with whoever else uses the instance, but you also can use something like libredirect to further distribute your search results across various instances for further security
How exactly do you self host your own searxng instance? Also, based on what you said, wouldn’t having your own instance make you stand out more?
Having your own instance can be bad for privacy, as all your searches come from your IP (hosted at home) or the same IP (hosted on a server). They might not be traced to you personally, but you might still get personalized results or your search may still be tracked, depending on how they track you.
That’s circumvented when using it with some or better many other people. But then, you need to trust the admin of that instance.
Self-hosted is easy if you know a bit about servers. You need a domain pointing to a server. If it’s the only thing hosted on that server and you have set up docker on it, you can just follow their instructions here to get it running in less than 5 minutes (assuming you run the default config and don’t customize all of the settings for a while): https://github.com/searxng/searxng-docker?tab=readme-ov-file#how-to-use-it
Ah ok gotcha. So it’s a trade-off of having the instance always up vs privacy? Interesting. Thanks for the detailed info! I keep meaning to get into self hosting lol
No, it’s not „always up“.
There are three main ways how Google, Bing,… can track you:
- When you’re doing a search while being logged in, it’s probably you
- If you’re not logged in, they can set a cookie to recognize you on your next visit (although they may not be able to link this to you, your email address,… but that’s not needed). They may mix your searches with those of the other users of your PC, when those are using the same PC, browser and account (e.g. if you have a family PC with a single windows/Linux account that everyone uses)
- Even if you’re not logged in and don’t accept / delete your cookies, they still see your IP. Depending on your ISP you might have the same Ip for a long time or you might have it rotated regularly. Now they could only track the searches of your household (assuming everyone isn’t logging in and deleting cookies immediately)
With Searxng, they can only do the last variant. But assuming you use a “real” server in the internet (and not one at home), it will likely have the same IP for its lifetime. And if you’re using it alone, that’s the only thing they need to identify you and track your searches. The more other people use your instance, the less useful this kind of tracking gets. Too much noise to identify a single person.
Ah ok that makes more sense, thanks!
Someone already gave an extensive comment about how to set things up so I will skip that part.
Good observation re: self hosting potentially reducing privacy. The way that I keep my privacy during self-hosting is to completely avoid search engines that track my IP address, and then, ideally, although the remaining search engines are less efficient than the likes of Google or Bing, the fact that the results are aggregated hopefully increase the efficiency of the results.
For my default searches, it uses mwmbl, mojeek & qwant
Oh ok gotcha! Thanks, that makes sense!
I use startpage.
Also a bit unrelated, but I just found that Gigablast shut down 10 months ago. And also this (a bit earlier) comment from the author: (source)
Yeah, Google forced my search engine basically out of business. I had ixquick.com as a big client at one time; I was providing them with search results from my custom web search engine. Then their CEO called me one day and told me he was cancelling, even though he’d been a client for over 10 years. He said it was because of some change Google had made to their agreement. Ixquick needed Google’s results and ads for their startpage.com website, and, even though my results were shown on their ixquick.com and later ixquick.eu sites, apparently Google wasn’t good with that.
They were purchased by and ad company a whole back
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/di5rn3/startpage_is_now_owned_by_an_advertising_company/
I want to take this time to say DDG is getting worse in the hopes they reverse course if I say it enough times.
They are giving location based results even when location is off. They are putting us in the bubble they based their marketing around being outside of
duckduckgo is a US company and the CEO is the previous founder of The Names Database. i don’t know how anyone trusts it when there are so many EU alternatives
So many yet in a thread asking for names you could name one.
deleted by creator
Like for example?
Qwant (france-based), startpage (NL-based), searxng (bunch of host options)
honorary mention to Stract which is currently totally useless because the results are so random, but hopefully in a few years it will be a proper alternative. they are indexing the web from scratch in order to not have to rely on existing data from other search engines (which is why the results are terrible right now lol)
Start page was purchased by an ad company a while back
didn’t know, that sucks
Yes it does. We have almost no options left any more. They all get ventured capitalisted
FUCK ME.
Yeah, there’s no winning
It doesn’t appear to be that bad though
It doesn’t appear to be down:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=test&ia=webIt could be a regional outage. Something like duckduckgo isn’t going to be run from a single location so the individual experiences are going to vary.
searxng is my first, ddg second
How do you propose that?
if youre asking for the link, i use search.bus-hit.me, more instances can be found on searx.space
what?
MetaGer is a metasearch engine focused on protecting users’ privacy. Based in Germany, and hosted as a cooperation between the German NGO ‘SUMA-EV - Association for Free Access to Knowledge’ and the University of Hannover, the system is built on 24 small-scale web crawlers under MetaGer’s own control. In September 2013, MetaGer launched MetaGer.net, an English-language version of their search engine.
And it was initially founded in 1996!
_Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer_
It currently supports the following languages/regions:
Dansk (Danmark)
Deutsch (Österreich/Schweiz/Deutschland)
English (Great Britain/Ireland/Malaysia/USA)
Español (España/México)
Suomalainen (Suomi)
Français (Canada/France)
Italiano (Italia)
Nederlands (Nederland)
Polski (Polska)
Svenska (Sverige)
_Source: https://metager.org/lang_
There is a TOR-hidden service too:
It is open source:
https://gitlab.metager.de/open-source/MetaGer
And other useful features, for example:
That you can hide yourself behind our proxyserver just by opening the result anonymously? Use “OPEN ANONYMOUSLY”; this also affects the following links.
_Source: https://metager.org/tips_
Alternatively I use some SearxNG-instances, preferably hosted in the EU:
I’ve used DDG for years but I’m worried that Microsoft has some power with them. Also that its headquarters is in the US, where there are hardly any laws that protect the user. I used Qwant for a season, based in France, but he asked me to remove the browser’s ad blocker. Since then, I use a SearXNG instance, waiting to mount my own. Very happy.
Duck duck go is my 2nd lol. SearX is my first.
Why?
Duckduckgo doesn’t remove microsoft’s trackers. We really need a good search engine out here, searx is the best I’ve found.
How would you say it compares to old Google?
Seems to be ok enough. Honestly imo better since google most often serves bullshit instead of answers these days.
This is what I use because they take your ad revenue and plant trees. Judge for yourself.
Second this, it’s fast and they have good privacy practices as far as I’m aware.
No one really talks about it and it’s in its infancy, but I’ve really been enjoying Stract.com
I was cheeky and put Lemmy into the “find a website” menu and it listed off a bunch of instances.
If you’ve used Kagi, it has a feature much like “lens” to raise the weight of fediverse results too
I really want to like stract but I can’t get it to give me good results. I typically search for programming related things and it has difficulty pulling up relevant information regarding things like documentation and posts regarding the issue.
That’s fair, I can’t say I’ve daily-driven it yet since I’ve still got my Kagi sub, but I’m thinking of defaulting it on my work computer to put it through its paces. It’s done fairly well with some of my tests, but definitely seems to still be getting refined, I’ve noticed recent information can be difficult to find on it
Stract seems like an interesting option with optics and such. What is your opinion on it?
I only just started using it recently, so i don’t have a solid opinion yet, but it seems pretty good!
Thanks! I guess I’ll just try and using it for a while :)
