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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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[–] ggaaap 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This. Clean, reliable and functional. Although I’ve never wrapped my head around how they make their $$

[–] al4s 10 points 1 year ago

They place ads in the search results.

If you disable your ad blocker, the first search result will almost always an Amazon ad. I test searched for "Headphones" and it also shows a row of JBL headphones at the top ala google shopping, which is an ad as well.

Really, they make their money the same way as google, they just don't track your searches and site visits.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They still run ads, just less profitable ones since they're less intrusive, aren't personalised, and most never see them anyway because if youre on DDG in the first place, you're also likely to be using adblock.