So with the recent Bing situation I wanted to take a second look on private search engines and sharing my conclusions of each search engine. Here is my list of private search engines:
I really like Duckduckgo, it has all important tools, decent result quality and a great image search function. Instant answers is very useful. My main problems are the reliance on Bing as the index and the choice of Apple Maps as mapping solution. Apart from the situation with the browser and Microsoft tracking Duckduckgo has a pretty clear record and the privacy.
Startpage is another great option. Apart from mapping everything is there and, while not as good as Duckduckgo’s, the image search engine good. The results are based on google and on par to better than those of DDG. The main advantages over DDG are European base (Netherlands) and the anonymous view, which basically functions as a quick access VPN, but sadly breaks ad/tracker blockers. Privacy for regular search is equal to DDG, but you have to disable JS to get rid of some telemetry. It is owned by an advertising company
Swisscows is okay. It is also Bing based, but slightly worse than DDG results. It lacks image search filters and mapping, but offers a music search which allows you to listen to ad free music. It also has an anonymous view, but it’s not interactive. Privacy is similar to DDG, but has more telemetry and (temporally) stores your IP. It is from Switzerland, it also has a very strict anti gore/porn policy that sometimes makes normal search terms inaccessible.
Qwant used to be very solid French search engine, has dropped in quality. Similar search quality to DDG, image search like Startpage. They use Bing in combination with their own index. Then problems: They share your IP with Microsoft and they replaced their main advantage, openstreetmap based independent mapping service, with AI summary’s that require an account. Worse privacy than all the above.
Very similar to DDG. The main differences are that Ecosia is based in Germany, it plants trees to fight climate change, but also forwards your IP to MS.
Braves main advantages are being independent, both with the search and the AI, and the goggles that allow you to customize your results. Search results are slightly better than DDG, image search is bad, no mapping is available. Brave has had invaded privacy in the past, but currently the privacy is good as long as you disable statistics. The company itself is a bit concerning and the CEO is homophobic.
SearXNG is self hosted and open source, it uses various search engines as index and has a ton of extra feature like music search, fediverse search and a bunch more. While it has the most features and best privacy of all options, public instances are sometimes slow and the results aren’t really good.
Kagi is in principle a decent quality search engine, but it is paid and has some problems that are only getting worse. For those interested read this blogpost.
4get is a open source, self hostable search engine. It acts as a web scraper for various search engines, also supports Soundcloud. It has great privacy and good results, but it lacks mapping and the official instance requires a CAPTCHA per 100 searches
Yep is an independent search engine. It is private and has good results, but lacks image search tools, video search and mapping.
Decentralized independent search. It has good results but lacks image search tools, is sometimes unreliable and has intrusive advertising
A quick fire round of search engine that have decent privacy, but I wouldn’t use due to result quality:
Ekoru Like Ecosia, but for cleaning oceans, Bing based, few features, requires extension.
Whoggle Like SearXNG, but with less features.
Metager Meta search engine with multiple search back ends, mainly Bing (Yahoo), completely powered by renewable energy
Mojeek Independent UK search engine with few additional feature, is supposed to be unbiased
AstianGO Slightly modified version of LibreX by the Devs of the Midori Browser
Ghostery German independent search engine, regular web only, offers tracker analysis for websites
Stract Open source, self hostable, independent search engine
Lilo Like Ecosia, but with fewer features and the option to support various projects
YouCare Bing based search, shares your IP with MS, does “good deeds”, some missing features
Giburu Google based proxy search
Gigablast Open source, self hostable, independent search engine
Mwmbl Open source, independent, self hostable search engine. Only web results
Marginalia Open source, independent, self hostable search engine. Only web results, offers filters
That would be my list. I’ll still be sticking with Duckduckgo but I’d reconsider if Startpage improves it image search. Brave will probably never be my default, but it has proven it’s role as a more private backup. Comment if I missed any search engine
Search engines I didn’t include due to horrible privacy Bing/Google/Yandex/Yahoo/You/Baidu
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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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The software itself doesn’t require any Captcha, it’s just the specific instance you chose that has this requirement. There are many other instances (like e.g. 4get.ch) that don’t have a Captcha at all. You can find the entire instance list at https://4get.cynic.moe/instances. It also shows you whether an instance has the captcha enabled or not.
What about Mullvad Leta?
Can someone explain like I’m 5 searXNG?
Like, I vaguely understand the terms everyone uses to explain it but I don’t really understand what it does or how it does it. I’ve used a public instance of it that the maintainers of my Linux distro provide and is set as default search on a fresh install. The results weren’t terrible but did take some time to load, which is the main reason I tend to use other engines.
If I self host it do I get better performance? What about results? Are they different on different instances?
SearXNG searches google, bing etc. for you and shows them to you. Speed depends on server speed and user number. Even if you don’t self host you can change the search providers in the settings, which can have an effect on result quality, but the less you choose the faster
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I have tried all the engines for this post and Ekoru has been working fine. I’m using the Firefox rpm on Fedora, slightly hardened, no VPN, Quad9. Make sure the Ekoru extension is up to date and has all the necessary permissions or alternatively try lilo
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Lilo is more feature complete than Ekoru and allows you to choose a charity (including ocean cleaning), maybe check it out
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In the settings of your browser click add search engine, and the paste this link
I used to be a Kagi subscriber because I believed in their image for Orion. Their strong views on privacy, imo, directly conflict with their action to keep the product closed source “because it’d slow them down”, so I ended up unsubscribing. Good to see I unsubbed just in time.
Thanks for the linked blogpost about Kagi! That saved me a lot of money.
It really changed my mind about it… I want to support a privacy focused search engine, not an AI-loving mess without focus on their core product.
I will have a look at MetaGer next. Although I am sad that there is still no good original search engine with it’s own results… Still all depending on Google and Microsoft.
In the forum we also have a huge list of search engines (arranged alphabetically with it’s corresponding insert codes)
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Thanks a lot for the write up!
Thanks for the list!
One point I will add is that Startpage is actually owned by an American spamming company:
https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-group/
I used to use them a lot before the system1/Privacy One acquisition, but then decided to switch back to google (never liked DDG’s results, but might have to try them again).
Google is most definitely worse than system1/Privacy One.
Maybe, maybe not.
Google does have PR considerations to manage.
Not saying they are better, but it is one constraint on their behaviour that doesn’t apply to system1/privacy one.
The fact that they are not very open about the acquisition of Startpage also doesn’t inspire confidence.
No. That’s for smaller companies. Google is at the point where they can do whatever the hell they want without having to care about “PR considerations”. They could praise genocide and it’s hard to imagine people would drop Youtube, Google Search, Android or Chrome.
This is a very comprehensive summary, thanks for the effort you clearly put in.
If I can make one correction, it would be to clarify that Ecosia is not really comparable to DuckDuckGo in terms of privacy. Not only does it log your IP address, but it also logs your search queries and forwards both of these to Microsoft and/or Google (depending on how you choose to search). Ecosia anonymises your IP address after a week, but for Microsoft that process takes 6 months and for Google it takes 9 months. In contrast, DuckDuckGo does not log your IP address and only collects anonymised search results, completely separated from any personal identifier. It does not forward this data to any third party. DuckDuckGo has also made privacy-guaranteeing agreements with Microsoft around ads (which are provided by Microsoft). Ecosia has not made similar agreements with Microsoft and Google from what I can tell.
I mainly use Andisearch, maybe one of the most privacy protecting search engine with AI. It’s PP is pretty impressive
Startpage recently started collecting browser/OS telemetry using JavaScript so if you want to use it you should disable JavaScript on their site
I would use kagi, but only if they supported monero payments.
What is the issue with BTC You can send BTC anonymously too
I stopped reading after Brave, as you chose to derail your product reviews to meddle in someone’s personal beliefs. Those two things have no correlation.
Brave is a series scam company. That’s perfectly technical in a privacy context. This post should be more clear about that, though.
If someone using Brave gives him money and that money goes in to a homophobic lobby it would be better for consumers to know that so they can actually consent to that. Consumers deserve to make informed decisions about who to or who not to support.
Sure, consumers should make informed decisions. But this was a technical\feature review until OP brought in their personal feelings on someone’s personal beliefs. Once they did that, they no longer were doing technical review on search engines.
Maybe it wasn’t designed to be a purely technical review, then?
someone being a dickhead givs me the right to say im no t sure about their product, bc theyre a dickhead mrow. this is good journalism, as it shows not only where the product is, but where it may be going (and a link so u can see for urselfs). OP dids a very good job if u want me dead i havethe right to tell u to go fuck urself :3
Thank you for proving my point.
What about Presearch.com ?