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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] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Default search in Firefox: SearXNG (List of Instances) (solves 60-80%)

if not the solution, I then search for "dd [term]" which goes to duckduckgo. Solves mostly the rest.

If not, and I am really desperate, I try: "dd !g [term]" so it goes to ddg, redirects to google and then I am reminded how bad a first page result can be. Only ads, sponsored entries and only big company names. Good luck finding anything from a forum or a small blog on google today. All the search words are bundled up in company results that has nothing to do with the topic.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You don’t use an adblocker?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Sure. But how is that changing the quality of google results? Are you trolling?

[–] darreninthenet 1 points 1 year ago

Have a look at uBlacklist it removes a lot of the SEO rubbish for me

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

I meant because you mentioned there’s nothing but ads which would be gone with an adblocker. Did you mean the actual results are essentially ads or literally the ads and Sponsored post at the top?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Sponsored results. I do not see ads, but I can see from the thing that I was searching for, and the difference between the that abd the first 4 results, that this can not be a real search result but a highly customized and profiled result. The results are just straight garbage.