As asked.

  • Frosty@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    74
    arrow-down
    7
    ·
    edit-2
    10 months ago

    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.

  • andrew@lemmy.stuart.fun
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    51
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • Crewman@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      38
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      10 months ago

      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.

        • elbowgrease@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          10 months ago

          I loved stumbled upon! it’s got repetitive after a while, but I found a bunch of stuff I never otherwise would have

      • sudneo@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        10 months ago

        I have also discovered very interesting blogs or site that I have then added to my RSS feed. They also offer a lens to only look within the small web, which they index themselves I think.

      • Atemu@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        10 months ago

        Just not looking forward to when they sell to venture capatilists down the line, and everything becomes terrible.

        Judging by their ethos so far, I don’t think that’s a goal. I’d almost say it’s a non-goal.

        • Crewman@sopuli.xyz
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          10 months ago

          I hope you’re right, but there’s plenty of well meaning projects and people that saw a large amount of money being offered and blinked.

    • dmnknf@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      15
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      10 months ago

      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

        • randomperson@lemmy.today
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          12
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          10 months ago

          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.

          • dmnknf@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            7
            ·
            10 months ago

            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

            • tetris11@lemmy.ml
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              7
              ·
              10 months ago

              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.

          • Atemu@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            7
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            10 months ago

            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.

    • Pixel@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      10 months ago

      does kagi spit out location-relevant information? that’s something I’ve really missed on startpage, I like being able to just google “chinese food” and have the restaurants near me spit back out, and if a privacy-centered search engine can return a result comparable to something like google there that’d make me real happy

      • kinttach@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        10 months ago

        Nope. For that I use the bang shortcut feature to send it to Google.

        One nice thing about that, is that you can use g as a bang, instead of !g. It’s a little thing but easier to type on mobile.

      • Atemu@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        10 months ago

        They use approximate network location for such requests, yes.

        “chinese food” didn’t trigger it for me which is understandable since it’s a generic term, not a request to show chinese food restaurants near you but “chinese food near me” does show restaurants in my approximate vicinity as expected aswell as localised search results for tripadvisor.

        In their privacy policy they claim that that’s explicitly the only time they use data that could be considered sensitive in a search request.

      • randomperson@lemmy.today
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        10 months ago

        There is a map search mode that does surface location aware results, after explicitly getting your permission to get your location.

        • Atemu@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          10 months ago

          Kagi does not request location permission; it uses network location (IP geo lookup).

          • kinttach@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            10 months ago

            So this is confusing. I did not know about the maps mode (thanks @randomperson@lemmy.today!). If you show the map and then press the “target” symbol to get your location, Kagi will prompt to enable geolocation.

            When using a regular search for “chinese food near me” I see results for a city thousands of km away. But if I select Maps first, then it shows my local area and I can search on the map.

            • Atemu@lemmy.ml
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              10 months ago

              Oh, yes indeed. Map mode would request accurate geolocation.

              When using a regular search for “chinese food near me” I see results for a city thousands of km away.

              Yeah, that’s an unfortunate reality of IP geolocation, it’s not very accurate to begin with and can be extremely inaccurate in some cases too.
              Does Google (without a login) have the same issue with your public IP?

              Perhaps when a location query is detected Kagi could show a little button to use accurate geolocation instead. They seem to be pretty on top of little UX issues like these, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they implemented a solution like that if you opened a feedback thread.

  • macattack@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    42
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    10 months ago

    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

    • JetpackJackson@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      10 months ago

      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?

      • elvith@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        14
        ·
        edit-2
        10 months ago

        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

        • JetpackJackson@feddit.de
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          10 months ago

          Ah ok gotcha. So it’s a trade-off of having the instance always up vs privacy? Interesting. Thanks for the detailed info! I keep meaning to get into self hosting lol

          • elvith@feddit.de
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            10 months ago

            No, it’s not „always up“.

            There are three main ways how Google, Bing,… can track you:

            1. When you’re doing a search while being logged in, it’s probably you
            2. If you’re not logged in, they can set a cookie to recognize you on your next visit (although they may not be able to link this to you, your email address,… but that’s not needed). They may mix your searches with those of the other users of your PC, when those are using the same PC, browser and account (e.g. if you have a family PC with a single windows/Linux account that everyone uses)
            3. Even if you’re not logged in and don’t accept / delete your cookies, they still see your IP. Depending on your ISP you might have the same Ip for a long time or you might have it rotated regularly. Now they could only track the searches of your household (assuming everyone isn’t logging in and deleting cookies immediately)

            With Searxng, they can only do the last variant. But assuming you use a “real” server in the internet (and not one at home), it will likely have the same IP for its lifetime. And if you’re using it alone, that’s the only thing they need to identify you and track your searches. The more other people use your instance, the less useful this kind of tracking gets. Too much noise to identify a single person.

      • macattack@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        10 months ago

        Someone already gave an extensive comment about how to set things up so I will skip that part.

        Good observation re: self hosting potentially reducing privacy. The way that I keep my privacy during self-hosting is to completely avoid search engines that track my IP address, and then, ideally, although the remaining search engines are less efficient than the likes of Google or Bing, the fact that the results are aggregated hopefully increase the efficiency of the results.

        For my default searches, it uses mwmbl, mojeek & qwant

  • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    23
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    10 months ago

    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.

  • Squizzy@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    18
    ·
    10 months ago

    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

  • FIST_FILLET@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    19
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    10 months ago

    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

    • burrito@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      10 months ago

      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.

  • kaputter Aimbot@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    10 months ago

    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:

    https://metager.org/tor


    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:

    https://searx.space/


  • Zicoxy3@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      10 months ago

      I was cheeky and put Lemmy into the “find a website” menu and it listed off a bunch of instances.

      • Nyanix@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        10 months ago

        If you’ve used Kagi, it has a feature much like “lens” to raise the weight of fediverse results too

    • Myaa@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      10 months ago

      I really want to like stract but I can’t get it to give me good results. I typically search for programming related things and it has difficulty pulling up relevant information regarding things like documentation and posts regarding the issue.

      • Nyanix@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        10 months ago

        That’s fair, I can’t say I’ve daily-driven it yet since I’ve still got my Kagi sub, but I’m thinking of defaulting it on my work computer to put it through its paces. It’s done fairly well with some of my tests, but definitely seems to still be getting refined, I’ve noticed recent information can be difficult to find on it

    • mac@infosec.pub
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      10 months ago

      Second this, it’s fast and they have good privacy practices as far as I’m aware.