I have used SearXNG for a while, but I switched to LibreX after the search engine started glitching. Recently, though, LibreX has stopped returning any results. I am currently on Mojeek, but the results aren’t that great.
I have also tried Qwant, but I wasn’t too keen on it. Startpage will be impractical, as I use a VPN and this engine often blocks me because of it. I don’t want to use Brave Search for a number of reasons. MetaGer has too many important features behind its paywall. I’m not sure about DuckDuckGo, but I could use it if there was no other option.
Any suggestions, or am I being too picky?
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
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.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
- 0 users online
- 84 users / day
- 537 users / week
- 1.5K users / month
- 6.58K users / 6 months
- 1 subscriber
- 2.39K Posts
- 55.4K Comments
- Modlog
As main search, among others, I use Andisearch, it’s an AI search assistant, with own lenguage model and one of the most private search engine. own reader mode for websites in the search results, so you don’t need to visit it, you also can watch YouTube and others sandboxed right in the search results, anonymous use, no ads, no tracking, no logs.
https://andisearch.com
Easy add it to your search engine list in your browser
https://andisearch.com/?query=%sI use MetaGer as my daily driver and you.com for deeper niche searches
Mind sharing? I’m curious because I switched to DDG several days ago, after a good while of using Brave. My reasons were:
Some people here mentioned Kagi and I liked it a lot when I was beta-testing it, but I will only start paying for using it when they introduce full support for Boolean operators, which most likely means never.
I don’t like Brave as a company. Brendan Eich is an arsehole, Brave Browser has had (minor, but numerous) controversies, their crypto stuff is off-putting, and now they’re sticking their new AI into everything.
deleted by creator
I’m not sure if it’s because DDG uses Bing for its results, but I feel like that might be why the results in DDG are like that. Might be coming directly from Bing, unless something happened with DDG that I don’t know about.
deleted by creator
Fair enough. I don’t use it. Just thought the results might be more because of Bing than their own algorithm or something.
removed by mod
some here won’t like the idea of a premium, private search engine but Kagi is one of the best tech discoveries I’ve made in a long time. I pay $5/month for 300 searches and always seem to hit the limit at the very end of my month, never payed the 1.5 cents per search after that.
can you explain more on why it’s worth that subscription?
You can sign up for a trial with 100 searches.
As for what is good, searches tend to pull up relevant info that is not buried under a bunch of seo shit. You can block, downgrade, and upgrade domains (I have blocked Pinterest from all my search results for instance). It’s just a very good experience. And long term I feel more confident in their user experience since their profit motivation is not tied to serving you up ads.
My biggest complaint is the 300 searches a month seems a little low.
But give the 100 free searches a shot. I have been very happy with them.
thanks. yea seems strange to limit searches
I use a self hosted instance of Whoogle. It threw up an error a few days back. Got stuck in Google captcha(probably an IP issue). Now it has reset and it is smooth sailing.
Yeah, it is simply Google results, but I think it’s fine…
Maybe some will dislike , but i use yandex, i don’t know why, but i get good results. I prefer to give them my info and not google
Definitely not. Never mind “out of the frying pan, into the fire”; for me, this is “out of the lake, into the fire”.
Using Yandex would involve giving my personal data to Russia. The possibility of my data falling into the wrong hands is the main reason I am looking for a private search engine; I’m certainly not then about to just walk up to the wrong hands and say “here you go”. Not to mention the censorship.
Besides, I’ve blacklisted the .ru, .su, and .рф, .москва, and .yandex TLDs in NextDNS.
Well i am far far from Russia so i don’t care, it can’t be worst compared to google. I don’t believe too much in the real privacy, one way or another 3 letter agencies will get the info.
A random thought
Do we really want search engines ?
Or, do we want AI to tell us the answers to our questions?
Considering how often chatGPT gives complete and utter bs answers, I think I’d rather find the info on my own.
Edge has integrated source citing for gpt4. It’s really nice for not keeping open a ton of tabs but logging them all in one place when researching something.
We want search engines. GPT-3.5 has a knowledge cutoff in 2021, so I only really use it for software recommendations and text/code formatting.
I am surprised that we wouldn’t prefer better AI.
Search engines today are geared to point us to a site where we then search again for our answer.
I am now just realizing I’d rather get a range of answers.
I wonder if that’s where we end up, a massive “wikipedia” of online nuggets of varying degrees of preferential truthiness….
Let me go ask chatgbt for the answer, hold on one second.
deleted by creator
I don’t like Brave as a company. Brendan Eich is an arsehole, Brave Browser has had (minor, but numerous) controversies, their crypto stuff is off-putting, and now they’re sticking their new AI into everything.
removed by mod
your*
removed by mod
What?
removed by mod
deleted by creator
Can you tell us why Qwant wasn’t a good choice for you? I heard they work hard on respecting privacy while providing good results… So I am curious about your experience
The engine occasionally throws up a “Sorry, we’ve detected unusual traffic from your IP address” and then I have to type in my query again after solving the captcha. They’re also based in France, which is bringing in anti-encryption laws and suchlike, so (unless I’m an idiot, which is not unlikely) the risk of something compromising Qwant is rising a bit.
On top of that, it’s the only privacy-respecting search engine not to achieve an A grade on ToS;DR.
Oh, very good points you mention here, definitively few red flags. As for the unusual traffic for your IP I experienced it because I’m using a VPN
It will be. However, I would prefer to keep the VPN on.
Of course… I can’t even picture myself not using a VPN, I prefer to ditch anything that prevent me to protect my privacy
Same here. I’ll go and live in a hut in Greenland before I go back to Google.
Totally agree…
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
I’m using https://metager.de/ it’s German and sometimes the results lean towards that but in 99% of cases it doesn’t matter.
There’s an English version out there, but some essential features are paid, such as enabling moderate safesearch or adding Mojeek as an engine.
removed by mod
Isn’t it basically bing?
removed by mod
It’s Bing results. For Navigation it links to Google and Bing. It’s main upside is planting trees. Which they do a well from the documentations and reports I’ve seen.
removed by mod
And their ads are very tame imo.
Qwant and kagi have been a great pair. Brave search was good, but they had some controversy a bit back.