this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
11 points (92.3% liked)
Privacy
4018 readers
57 users here now
A community for Lemmy users interested in privacy
Rules:
- Be civil
- No spam posting
- Keep posts on-topic
- No trolling
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I would recommend searxng its a little bit better and yeah.You can easily self host that too :) Its a meta (not the company) search engine. It requests multiple search engine. Its a really good way to aggregate multiple results from different search engine.
Isn't that ultimately like a VPN though? i.e. a different server is making the requests to those search engines and forwarding results to you? Why not just use a VPN and access your favorite directly if you don't care about aggregated results?
Then the thing is VPNs are the trojan horse themself. They know what you search, they know who you are. There are some exceptions, but in general they know those things. Its not like a vpn its like a proxy. It just proxies the content for you. From all of your wanted websites, you can easily self host it with docker.
The VPN doesn't know what you search if you use HTTPS
If you router your dns through it, yes it still can detect on what websites you were ( not directly the path like /comment/13232345 but the domain like google.com )
Yes, so it only knows you visited Google, not what you search
But still then if you click on it like wikipedia.com it knows that. That is already enough to track you where you go.
And if you have enabled prefetching it will prefetch all the websites ( and domains ) on your search result page so with it a vpn provider can guess what you searched.
But still its a middle man and you need to trust them a lot.
In that case, SearX also knows your IP address, so it's the same thing, right? VPNs are proxies.
The thing is. One of them wants to IMPROVE your privacy one "PROMISES" anonymity. It doesnt make you anonym. It makes you less trackable and less biassed about 1 search engine. It is NOT to grant you anonymity. The one you can host yourself ( and the other you can self host. But its useless for its cause because you have to put in your data in the hoster aka vpn ).
Searx(ng) is to IMPROVE privacy IMPROVE control but it does NOT make you anonymous, make yourself untrackable.