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I recommend startpage.com over duckduckgo. It provides at least the same privacy as DDG while having generally better results because it uses google's results instead of bing's.
Edit: The ultimate search engine though, as mentioned by macattack, is SearxNG because it combines privacy with every other search engine and even allows you to mix and match your result sources.
With all the SEO garbage, are G**gle results still relevant? I haven’t used it in years for anything serious.
Startpage is owned by a advertising company and closed source. wouldnt really recommend it
I also like startpages’ anonymous viewer
My first choice is actually Kagi these days. I pay for my search provider to have some peace of mind that my search provider isn't selling me.
I got it not too long ago, and I love it. The results are good, and the features are what i wish all search engines had. Just not looking forward to when they sell to venture capatilists down the line, and everything becomes terrible.
In the meantime, everyone should check out their Small Web intiative. Gives you a random blog or small website. There's some really good articles I would have never read otherwise.
I used to pay for kagi, but their CEO have some opinions that I absolutely hate about how to handle some issues, and this was a deal breaker for me. Nowadays I'm using searxng
What opinions can I ask? first time I've heard this
They announced a few months ago that they would partner with Brave to surface Brave search results too. The CEO of Brave is known to be homophobic. People got mad, and Kagi’s response was that they are too small to be picky, and have to focus on search quality.
And theres the issue someone opened on their page suggesting to include a special card on suicide related searches telling people how to find help, and the CEO dismissed saying it can be just someone curious making the search and he don't want to "set a precedent" on showing things the user is not actively searching
I... think I agree with that though.
I'm not saying there isn't a grey area between being socially conscious or full blow libertarian, but I do think that a search engine operates much better when it is unrestricted by societal qualms.
Look how stunted ChatGPT becomes with each new rendition, or how SDXL is far more restrictive in what it can express compared to its earlier SD1.5 models.
And also, like, their partnership with one of the most immoral companies on this planet drive most of the search results quality from the very beginning (Google). You didn't sign up for a morally perfect search engine.
When people made such a huge fuss about the CEO of some minor index that Kagi also happens to use beside like 10 others being a douche, all I could do is shake my head.
I self-host searXNG, but you can use one of the public instances as well. My understanding is that it is more secure because you're search results are commingled with whoever else uses the instance, but you also can use something like libredirect to further distribute your search results across various instances for further security
How exactly do you self host your own searxng instance? Also, based on what you said, wouldn't having your own instance make you stand out more?
Having your own instance can be bad for privacy, as all your searches come from your IP (hosted at home) or the same IP (hosted on a server). They might not be traced to you personally, but you might still get personalized results or your search may still be tracked, depending on how they track you.
That's circumvented when using it with some or better many other people. But then, you need to trust the admin of that instance.
Self-hosted is easy if you know a bit about servers. You need a domain pointing to a server. If it's the only thing hosted on that server and you have set up docker on it, you can just follow their instructions here to get it running in less than 5 minutes (assuming you run the default config and don't customize all of the settings for a while): https://github.com/searxng/searxng-docker?tab=readme-ov-file#how-to-use-it
I use startpage.
Also a bit unrelated, but I just found that Gigablast shut down 10 months ago. And also this (a bit earlier) comment from the author: (source)
Yeah, Google forced my search engine basically out of business. I had ixquick.com as a big client at one time; I was providing them with search results from my custom web search engine. Then their CEO called me one day and told me he was cancelling, even though he'd been a client for over 10 years. He said it was because of some change Google had made to their agreement. Ixquick needed Google's results and ads for their startpage.com website, and, even though my results were shown on their ixquick.com and later ixquick.eu sites, apparently Google wasn't good with that.
They were purchased by and ad company a whole back
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/di5rn3/startpage_is_now_owned_by_an_advertising_company/
I think mojeek is the best in privacy atm but it isn't really good as a search engine.
you can smash the "submit feedback" button on the page when you get a duff search and send it into us, it's how we improve: https://blog.mojeek.com/2024/02/major-algorithm-update.html
Will do and i love your ethics.
First time I've heard of Mojeek. Why should I trust it more than any other company? Is there anything particular about its economic model or governance that makes it less likely to decide to be unethical?
I want to take this time to say DDG is getting worse in the hopes they reverse course if I say it enough times.
They are giving location based results even when location is off. They are putting us in the bubble they based their marketing around being outside of
duckduckgo is a US company and the CEO is the previous founder of The Names Database. i don’t know how anyone trusts it when there are so many EU alternatives
It doesn't appear to be down:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=test&ia=web
It could be a regional outage. Something like duckduckgo isn't going to be run from a single location so the individual experiences are going to vary.
MetaGer is a metasearch engine focused on protecting users' privacy. Based in Germany, and hosted as a cooperation between the German NGO 'SUMA-EV - Association for Free Access to Knowledge' and the University of Hannover, the system is built on 24 small-scale web crawlers under MetaGer's own control. In September 2013, MetaGer launched MetaGer.net, an English-language version of their search engine.
And it was initially founded in 1996!
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer
It currently supports the following languages/regions:
Dansk (Danmark)
Deutsch (Österreich/Schweiz/Deutschland)
English (Great Britain/Ireland/Malaysia/USA)
Español (España/México)
Suomalainen (Suomi)
Français (Canada/France)
Italiano (Italia)
Nederlands (Nederland)
Polski (Polska)
Svenska (Sverige)
Source: https://metager.org/lang
There is a TOR-hidden service too:
It is open source:
https://gitlab.metager.de/open-source/MetaGer
And other useful features, for example:
That you can hide yourself behind our proxyserver just by opening the result anonymously? Use "OPEN ANONYMOUSLY"; this also affects the following links.
Source: https://metager.org/tips
Alternatively I use some SearxNG-instances, preferably hosted in the EU:
I've used DDG for years but I'm worried that Microsoft has some power with them. Also that its headquarters is in the US, where there are hardly any laws that protect the user. I used Qwant for a season, based in France, but he asked me to remove the browser's ad blocker. Since then, I use a SearXNG instance, waiting to mount my own. Very happy.
No one really talks about it and it's in its infancy, but I've really been enjoying Stract.com
This is what I use because they take your ad revenue and plant trees. Judge for yourself.
Qwant.com ?
I used to use DDG until they started censoring results.
I use Brave Search and Startpage. The latter is basically just a private Google proxy with some cool features and the former is fully independent, private, aesthetically appealing and has nice optional AI features.
DDG really does censor results hard. They even blocked my list of US atrocities from their search results.
My own searx-ng instance (routed via VPN), followed by Startpage
DDG has a weird relationship with Microsoft, I wouldn't use it. I currently pay the Pro plan for Kagi and I'm very satisfied with it.