Search Engine Privacy
Search Engine Privacy
I've recently learned that DDG does not follow its own guidelines for privacy. I'm curious what search engines people here would recommend. I would prefer a search engine that not only respects my privacy but also doesn't hide or shadow ban content it doesn't like. Any recommendations?
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I suspect that maybe you were exposed to a certain post over on lemmy.ml @ local link: https://lemmy.one/post/657560
I'd invite you to read through my comment deconstructing the silliness of that entire post...the accusations and links are highly flimsy and poorly support the assertions being made. https://lemmy.one/comment/708741
I won't deny that it's likely that DDG isn't as privacy focused today as it may have been when it was initially founded; but I haven't seen anything on the fediverse compile enough reasons today that would support the panic I'm seeing over it if you just look into what few sources are quoted and being used and assess critically what might be going on.
That being said...
I do recommend SearXNG. Highly.
The metasearch engine that SearXNG offers usually works well and allows you to pick, choose, and sift through the various search engines and even define and create new ones you can use for yourself so that you can easily search whatever you need.
Searx instances in general are kinda like email providers too; just find a good one for yourself and start using it; no real account is required...just find one that works for you and set up your preferences and all.
I do not recommend Kagi! Kagi is a paid search engine. In general I do not consider their paid service to be better than Searx and would not recommend using them. Usage of a paid service requires creating an account...and we all know where that garden path lies.
I just want to say as a Kagi user I like it a lot. I don’t need to search anything weird, and my search history doesn’t describe acting about my persona I wouldn’t say on my own anyway… many I should be more worried? Not sure, but I believe they don’t track or sell info.
Not sure, but I believe they don’t track or sell info. Doubt they need to with their paid subscription. Though I can't justify buying Kagi since I barely search anything in of itself.
THat is correct. I appreciate the clarity :).
As for SearXNG, you need a means to host an instance of that as well as a domain yeah?
You can find many public hosted instances here but some of them use Cloudflare because they fear DDoS attacks. So keep that in mind when choosing your instance. Best is to host your own instance.
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You can host your own, but you can also find a public instance.
Some thoughts from a long term SearXNG user: While I really appreciate how privacy respecting SearXNG is I had a lot of trouble with it. Often enough you get 0 results because of timeouts with the search engines it uses and sometimes the order of the presented search results isn't good. Sometimes the thing I've been searching for was the 10th result while in other search engines it was the first result. So the prioritizing of the results is often enough just odd.
We live in a time where there are so many search engines but all of them have their flaws. It's really frustrating. :(
I recommend finding a different instance then. Not every instance is going to be great at it, and you do have to do a lot of fiddling around with preferences and be-bopping between various instances when the current instance is timing out.
...Or you could just hit F5 and try your search query again. For some reason that seems to work sometimes. It is possible to configure an instance to not get slammed; and you can host one yourself too
The problem is that it doesn't matter which instance I use. I tried multiple instances, even self-hosted one myself. Sooner or later I always had the problem with timeouts (even with my self-hosted local instance) and it's so damn annoying. Even refreshing the page doesn't always help. I really don't feel like hopping from instance to instance just because my preferred instance has timeouts again. Reliability is crucial to me.
Did you check the preferences on the instance and change the default engine selections? You can check the engines and de-select engines that are turning out to be unreliable with results; which should result in fewer errors.
Of course I did. The thing is that the reliability of the search engines per instance varies from time to time so there's not a single instance that will always work perfectly and never has timeouts.