They’re talking too much business to be a ‘private’ search. They don’t make any effort to explain how their search is private at all (except the 90/10 share model).

Time to ungoogle my phone once again. Did it before, reverted it in a stupid move to try out Monster Hunter “Go”; should’ve never done it in the first place. Bye, bye, Google. Go fuck yourself.

It’s not like they’d develop a new engine for iOS. They already have one which can now be used for iOS as well – but not everywhere.

Yeah, agreed, Marginalia’s more suited to discover small-web type of content.

Another thing that’d be better as a daily driver, but requires manual curation, is to filter out specific domains in your searches. Brave supports that with the Goggles feature, Mojeek calls it Focus. AFAIK Kagi too has a similar feature.

I don’t know any search engine that’s able to fully exculde paywalled content though.

Maybe not exactly what you’re looking for, but Marginalia (https://search.marginalia.nu/) focuses on non-commercial and text-based content.

I’m not aware of any functionality which allows to block messages from unknown users. I think blocking them might be your only option right now.

Easier said than done (and already too late for you), I know, but: in general, be careful where you leave your number…

Mojeek has it’s own index. DuckDuckGo, Qwant and Brave have a partial index mixed with meta search results.

I agree that mentioning them is not helpful if the question explicitly is about WhatsApp vs. Telegram. However, Signal surely is simple enough that it can be used by anyone capable of using WhatsApp. It free, encrypted and a lot more trustworthy than any F**book app ever will be.