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?
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).
Are you being serious? You’re not mocking what I was saying?
I really want to like Searx but it’s not helpful.
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.
Go to https://searx.space and enjoy (one of these instances is mine).
It depends on your goal.
If you just want privacy for your daily not-to-weird usage and ease in both in the sense of setting it up and in that of good results and that’s it, DDG is probably fine for you.
I use Brave, simply because unlike most others, it has it’s own crawler. For me it’s results have been slightly better than DDG too, but I also hear people claim the opposite so I guess it really depends. DDG uses Bing’s results, and many others are also more like privacy front-ends for Bing or Google. If you want to totaly leave Big Tech, be it to not help with their power or because of principle, that’s likely the one that’s the most easy with the best results that fits.
SearXNG is self hosted and less accurate, but the most privacy friendly and not attached to any company as you host your own instance, while with Brave you still rely on Brave’s goodness. If you want total control, you want something like this.
I don’t use anything else from Brave, and default search engines are easy to change, so I’m personally not too worried about Brave’s power over me. I do preffer to stay away from Google and Microsoft, and only access them (prefferably trough privacy front-ends) if no other option works decent enough for me. I also prefer not to self-host due to the time and knowledge needed to do so securely. Well, I have knowledge, but I don’t want to worry about those things for my peivaye stuff all the time. Hence the choice of Brave.
It depends on your goal.
If you just want privacy for your daily not-to-weird usage and ease in both in the sense of setting it up and in that of good results and that’s it, DDG is probably fine for you.
I use Brave, simply because unlike most others, it has it’s own crawler. For me it’s results have been slightly better than DDG too, but I also hear people claim the opposite so I guess it really depends. DDG uses Bing’s results, and many others are also more like privacy front-ends for Bing or Google. If you want to totaly leave Big Tech, be it to not help with their power or because of principle, that’s likely the one that’s the most easy with the best results that fits.
SearXNG is self hosted and less accurate, but the most privacy friendly and not attached to any company as you host your own instance, while with Brave you still rely on Brave’s goodness. If you want total control, you want something like this.
I don’t use anything else from Brave, and default search engines are easy to change, so I’m personally not too worried about Brave’s power over me. I do preffer to stay away from Google and Microsoft, and only access them (prefferably trough privacy front-ends) if no other option works decent enough for me. I also prefer not to self-host due to the time and knowledge needed to do so securely. Well, I have knowledge, but I don’t want to worry about those things for my peivaye stuff all the time. Hence the choice of Brave.
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
Searx/Whoogle. Both on farside.link.
Btw, you can do farside.link/whoogle/<parameters> in your bookmarks.
