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Which privacy-focused search engine are you using? (self.technology)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by schmurnan to c/technology

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TL;DR - which privacy-focused search engine do people recommend, preferably one that can also easily be used as a default option in Safari?

I ditched Google in about 2016ish I would guess, and since then have used DDG as my default search engine.

As someone entrenched in the Apple ecosystem, it’s always seemed like a sound choice, as it’s one of the search engines built in to Safari on both iOS and macOS.

After spending a bit more time recently playing around with and updating my Docker containers, I started hosting a Whoogle container, which seemed to work pretty well, but I don’t see many out there talking about it, so not sure how good it actually is. I then tried a SearXNG container, but either had it misconfigured or just wasn’t getting many search results back.

At the moment I’m trying out Startpage, but I know there are potential privacy concerns since they were part-bought in 2019 by a US ad-tech company.

I’m also playing around with different browsers at the moment, flicking between Safari, Firefox and Brave. At which point I stumbled across Brave Search, which seems pretty promising.

So, which search engines do you all recommend?

UPDATE: Probably should’ve done a poll! But latest (if I’ve captured everything correctly) is:

DuckDuckGo - 10
Qwant / SearXNG / Kagi / Brave - 4
Startpage / Ecosia - 2
Google - 1

As to my other questions around browsers:

Majority seem to use Firefox
Some mentions of Brave
One mention of Arc

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

My own searxng instance, listed at https://searx.space

[–] schmurnan 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Perhaps I need to go back to figuring out SearXNG. Although I did read that there’s a slight privacy compromise to use SearXNG over SearX.

Perhaps that doesn’t apply if it’s self-hosted, though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Using self hosted SearXNG as well. If you have docker running already it's a snap to setup.

[–] schmurnan 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah I’ve got Docker up and running with lots of containers, but wasn’t getting any results back from SearXNG for some reason, kept getting timeouts. I’ve got everything running behind Traefik so might just be a bit of a config issue.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I probably wouldn't expose it externally to your network, but that's just me. Unless that's what you're doing, there aren't really any ports to expose with Traefik.

[–] schmurnan 1 points 1 year ago

No, I’m using local DNS in Pi-hole with a domain I own but nothing is externally accessible. And even if it were, I’ve got Authelia on all my containers (except, Vaultwarden because I can’t get it to work).