I was using DuckDuckGo for some time, but heard that there are better alternatives. I’m confused, because DDG is used by default in TOR browser, and other privacy respecting browsers (ex. Librewolf). Can you guys recommend any other search engine, and tell me why u recommend it?
Or, is DDG enough?
I used to run a private instance of SearXNG, but it wasn’t for me. I don’t really know exactly why.
I switched to Kagi now and I’m pretty happy with the results. However, there are some things to consider:
- Kagi costs money
- They claim to be privacy-friendly and that they don’t build a profile of you
- There’s no proof on that
- There’s no private way to pay, credit / debit card only
- Like that, they could totally build a profile of you
- They’re US-based, so what happens when one of the 3-letter-agencies asks them for user data?
Anyway. I’m trying to be positive and I really hope that I’m funding something good here. So far, I really like it.
I use DDG. I read here that start page had been taken over by an advertising company, and Brave always felt dodgy from day 1, weird crypto stuff and I think the owners previous company may have sold users data.
I think DDG is the best we have right now.
and Brave always felt dodgy
You mean like DDG, which had multiple privacy whoopsies like allowing Microsoft to track you? Or (in contrast to Brave) is not even OSS?
I think the owners previous company may have sold users data.
You mean like the founder and CEO of DDG who build, ran and sold a social network?
Not saying “don’t use DDG” or “Brave is the coolest!!!11”, but be aware that you can use your arguements against Brave against DDG as well.
And if you’re looking for a better alternative, I would say Ecosia is probably among the cleanest players out there. They only benefit Microsoft, because their service is built on Bing (as is DDG in part btw.).
Point taken on the founder running a social network. I incorrectly remembered it as the Brave owner. I stand corrected.
I think the complexity with DDG is they had a deal with MS because of Bing and I think some of the terms meant they had certain restrictions. They renegotiated that and it is no longer an issue.
You were comfortable with the whole BAT crypto nonsense? You’re comfortable with Google dictating standards in their browser by using Chrome?
Trust is definitely hard in the search market :).
I’m 100% comfortable with BAT, because the (at least so declared) goal is ethical ad-blocking. And if you don’t like it, you still don’t have to use it. You can disable it completely and I appreciate them leaving you the choice.
I won’t buy into it with actual money, but I do use it to donate to sites. Although I rarely use Brave tbh. I only have it in case some stupid website doesn’t run properly on Firefox.
It’s tempting tho. Brave is a way better and more versatile browser than Firefox is out of the box. I won’t recommend Firefox to normies seeking better privacy for this simple reason. If I tell them to just install a bunch of addons, configure everything right and get used to a new UI, most will question whether they really want to switch right away.
Chromium is FOSS and Brave has already made strong claims about not merging anything Google pushes (e.g. in the recent extensions controversy). I have very little concerns regarding that.
I use DuckDuckGo at home, but at work it’s blocked. I’ve argued for it to be unblocked but to no avail. I use Startpage at work because it appears to have the same results as Google but also lets you view images anonymously when possible.
I’ve heard of Startpage (which appears to be a frontend for Google results), but I personally like Brave Search more (visually, also you have !bangs for quickly searching wikipedia, ddg or startpage when you need it). I heard ecosia should be private, buy I’ve been ciritical and didn’t look into it yet, because its main focus appears to be planting trees.
Wow I’ve been using Brave search for a while now and had no idea bangs were a thing. It’d be nice if there was more ways to showcase them visually to help discover this nifty feature
Brave search because it is their search company that finds new ways to make users more anonymus, Brave is not a middle man for another company.
I don’t recommend because they force users to verify when searching if Startpage detects a VPN or Tor.
Some will say SearX, a self hosted search engine, the issue with SearX is the search results can be irrelevent or something random. I support it but I don’t use it due to not consistently being relevent to my search or not informative.
the issue with SearX is the search results can be irrelevent or something random. Haha, oh, right! I just remembered that often times when I searched something completely harmless some weird porn sites would appear in the results which had clearly absolutely nothing to do with the things I’ve been searching for. It’s one of the reasons why I stopped using SearX(NG).
You have to set SafeSearch at least to “moderate” to stop NSFW stuff appearing in your search. SearXNG only proxies what other engines feed to it.
I modified my searxNG to basically look through the results for anything on a ban list and exclude those items. But out of the box its just pulling stuff from a bunch of unreliable sources. I think you have to do a lot of tuning by using their built in tools to add sites you want to index and get rid of stuff you don’t. The cool thing is that you can fine tune it though.
Are you being serious? You’re not mocking what I was saying?
I really want to like Searx but it’s not helpful.
