this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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[–] [email protected] 52 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (21 children)

Mozilla didn't choose privacy. Qwant sends you IP address to Microsoft when you search on their platform. If you want a more responsible search engine, DuckDuckGo is still the way to go.

Update 3: DuckDuckGo also sends along more information than I originally noticed, including "anonymous browser and device information with our hosting and content providers for security and display purposes (for example, that you’re using a mobile device)"

The information collected by Qwant includes...

  • hash of the IP address
  • User Agent
  • market segment of a request
  • date and time of the visit
  • information of the country and the chosen language
  • search keywords
  • where a user came from
  • type of device used
  • source of visit
  • operating system
  • major browser version

Qwant may (will) transfer to Microsoft:

  • your full IP address
  • Information about the browser you are using (the User Agent
  • The first three bytes of your IP address;
  • The approximate geographic area at the origin of the search, at the scale of a region or city;
  • The hash generated from your IP address and User Agent

Update 2: removing name and email as that's only for optional account creation

Update 1: Qwant wants you to disable your ad blocker

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (6 children)

I would use SearxNG instead, using a public instance like searx.be. It is really lightweight, gets results from multiple indexes and is very privacy-friendly.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (5 children)

Honestly, I set up SearxNG on my own server, and it's not very nice to use, not very configurable and doesn't return high quality results. It's also kinda slow. Maybe I'm missing something?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

@isVeryLoud @hash0772 I had similar experience. I was able to resolve the slowness by enabling swap on the vps. What was worst is that over time Bing and Google API changed and it stopped working, took quite long troubleshooting. Occasionaly I would hit some kind of rate limit and got nothing from Google. It was too much hassle and not worth the vps cost.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Cost is whatever since this VPS is being used for other things.

I'm a bit confused about swap solving things though since it's unlikely to be a memory issue.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

@isVeryLoud It was for me, I monitored the server and each query would bump up the memory quite a bit. But that sucker had only 512 MB I think. It could've been some issue that's already fixed with newer Searx versions.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Ah that would definitely be it, my VPS has 4 GB of RAM and runs other services just fine. I set it up about a month ago.

You can try it yourself: https://searx.veryloud.ca/

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