It’s worth noting that DDG did update their policy after the blowback.

Blog post reaction
Current setup summarized

Tried Brave Search and felt like it was the closest to Google Search, in terms of a modernized-feel and good UI/UX, but after reading about the company and their questionable ethics, I switched to DDG instead. I’ll sacrifice my experience to avoid the more suspect company

I use this too

Might also be worth discussing on their forum in case it gets more traction and eyeballs there

I think the article appears biased because searxng appears to offer the same functionality as Kagi, in spite of being free, yet Kagi is shown to be the best in class for some reason? Also it doesn’t touch on the critique that kagi having a login potentially aggregates all of your searches into one account that is stored by one company.

Anyone backed by Peter Thiel is guilty by association at this point.

bad bot

Wayback Machine ftw. Here is August 2023:

The only piece of personal information we collect is the IP address your internet connection runs over at a given moment. Why? We need to protect ourselves against “spammers”, meaning ad fraud and bots trying to up-rank certain search results. Your IP address is anonymised after one week or less. For example, 192.168.152.223 becomes 192.168.XXX.XXX.

We still use Microsoft Bing to deliver search results, but using them through Ecosia is very different from searching on Bing directly. At Microsoft or Google, you are likely to have personal IDs which track you across all of their services: email, calendar, video platform, gaming, video conferencing, maps, locations, location history, and so on.

We don’t sell any data to anyone and we don’t buy any data either.

We are interested in the performance of our social media advertising, as well as answering your search results. We would like to know if users stay with us once they have seen our ads and installed us. This helps us run the right advertising campaigns on the right platforms. We never let those platforms know your search terms, though. We only share whether you are still searching with us or not. We only do so with your consent and you can remove that consent at any time.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230729030327/https://www.ecosia.org/privacy

Was struggling through an attempted self-install of SearXNG. So far so good, w/ this one, thanks for sharing

Wooof. I’ve started using Brave for less then 24 hours and I’m already jumping ship. Anyone backed by Peter Thiel is an immediate ‘no’ for me.

I’ll have to try Whoogle or SearXNG but search engines seem to regularly block my queries so that I only get random results from wikimedia. Maybe I can resolve the issues w/ self-hosting? Otherwise, I might just try to redirect most of my questions to open-source LLMs

The questionable privacy policy doesn’t negate the actual work being done. I’m no longer using them, but calling it tree NFTs is misguided

https://youtu.be/pPg_vDMeiJY?si=pmeBAG7HDXhmAOgV&t=73

Very pessimistic take. I highly doubt they are planting trees that are unlikely to be sustained.

I am not blaming them as much as I am reevaluating the level of privacy I’m sacrificing given the additional context in their updated statement

1. ‘Their’ privacy policy now roughly equates to “We don’t really do anything but you should read the privacy policy of Microsoft (and optionally Google).” It feels less like an alternative search engine and more like a middle-man that still passes the data along. Speaking of which:
2. Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but they are touting ‘non-personalized results and ads’ as if that’s the privacy end goal, when it’s really just the side-effect of companies not having data on you. Based on their updated policy, they are giving the illusion of privacy via ‘non-personalized results’ while capturing/sharing searches, behaviors & IP address that I’m guessing can easily be deanonymized @ Microsoft.

Maybe I’m misreading something? It reads like the same experience of using Bing without the marginal benefit of a personalized experience.

I think it’s a catch-22 because I’d imagine a sizeable cohort of their pro-environment demographic is likely pro-privacy/anti-‘corporations knowing everything about you’, and so while the increase in usefulness in data can increase their charitable donations, it will rub lots of users the wrong way.

I used it as my primary browser on my laptop/desktop. I supported the cause and through my usage I planted +150 trees, but the trade-off is steepening so I’m going to have to jump ship.

I’ll be pivoting to DuckDuckGo as my main search engine, and use Brave for more nuanced/specific results.

Good find

Webcord is an alternative front-end solution that is more privacy-orientated.

Gitlab won’t let me register w/o an email, phone # and credit card lol

Not that it is a deal-breaker, but this functionality is also built into Chromium browsers if you right click the address bar and select ‘manage search engines’

Randomly signed up yesterday and didn’t get any prompts for CC info fyi

Definitely feels like OP is describing a physical book. I supposed the nature of tech/humanity is to go full circle at times

Currently going through it right now w/ YouTube.

Started using alternative front-ends and was able to really curate my feed to be more productive. Now, Google is cracking down on the front-ends even when I cycle through different instances. So far I’m telling myself that even my productive feed wasn’t that productive, but I’ll probably take some of the info to heart in this thread and reevaluate a few things.