Switch to Qwant
Hi everyone, so I hear that a lot of are lost in choosing a good search engine apart from the popular ones, but I think I have the solution
The search engine I've been using on all my devices is named "Qwant" its French and of course European. Its private and fast, I've been using it and didn't had any issues with it.
So yes I am also new here on Lemmy and just wanted to be useful.
SearXNG is the best of ALL worlds. You can get results from every search engines, there’s no ads, and it’s self-hostable
I just got it set up yesterday and it's so good
With a private searxng instance searches still come from your single IP so if you use ie; google, bing, etc.. You're still being tracked heavily.
Unless you use a public instance where your searches are 'lost in the noise'. But then most of the search engines will block it so it doesn't work very well in my experience.
I'm of two minds of this. On one hand, like you said, all your searches will still track back to your IP address.
But on the other hand, if it's a pseudonymous IP address, you might end up giving out less information then if you contacted the search instances directly. You don't have to worry about scraping away cookies or using a specific browser or always being connected to a VPN. In essence, the self-hosted instance is your "VPN" for searches.
It would be nice if you could get your friends to also use your instance, but if not, I think a self-hosted instance for a party of one is not a meaningless venture.
I'm in learning-mode here, so forgive me if this is a dumb question: if I have my home server connect to a VPN for all outbound traffic, would that mitigate your issue with "your single IP". Would that make it so the IP they see is my VPN provider's, not mine? Thanks for any info
Thats better if you have your VPN change IP often, and also because VPN IPs are shared (unless you pay for a unique static IP) which means more noise in the traffic.
But if you have a dedicated VPN IP, it's basically the same then because your data can be tied to you at that IP.
Noted, and thanks!