I heard a lot of bad stuff about Brave and their CEO lately and am now unsure if the search engine is any good? Do they censor stuff? Is any data collected? Can it be considered private?
If you’d not recommend it, what are good alternatives and why? I was a long time duckduckgo user before, so anything similar to it or brave search would be great. I’m not into self hosting.
-You wrote in the about page that you dislike searx, why is that?// I didn’t create it, but you can ask the developer though. will@lolcat.ca
I moved away from Brave Search when they went 2+ months only offering Google or Bing for their image searches. I can strongly recommend digging into https://search.disroot.org though!
trustworthy
They are recommended on privacy guides: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/search-engines/#brave-search I generally trust privacy guides, although I don’t use Brave Search.
CEO
Their CEO is anti-vax and homophobic. Brave Browser (not search) has had some controversy around including crypto, replacing ads with their own, and having had inserted affiliate links into the URL bar in the past.
censor stuff
Hard to say, the job of a search engine is to show you what you want to find.
data collection
There is telemetry that can be turned off.
You can view “Brave ads” in exchange for crypto. That is what I meant by replacing ads.
I can recommend Kagi. Happy customer for over a year.
Some reading to get started:
Have also been using it for a while now, it’s the best alternative I tried so far. downsides are cost, closed-source, and my fear that they’re gonna take VC money in the future. So far, I can stand behind their offering tho. And the built-in feature to lower or raise results from certain pages is amazing.
Metager.org could also be a good daily drive
