I primarily use DuckDuckGo, and occasionally have to use a !bang to get to the Startpage or Google.
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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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.
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I've been enjoying Kagi but it's not for everyone.
Add a proxy to your browser and you should get through on Startpage.
Been a happy Kagi user for 6+ months now. No more Pinterest and other blogspam in my searches
What issues did you have with SearXNG?
You could try to self host it, or even just run it on your local machine.
Shameless plug on how to set it up locally, and how to set up custom filters (to block junk websites and redirect reddit to the old interface).
It stopped returning results. I tried other instances: same problems. However, I think the issue may have been fixed.
I am currently on an iPhone, and I'm not really in a position to self-host (although I did try to set up a FreedomBox the other day).
Ah fair enough.
I started by having it on my laptop, and used it only there. Liked it so much that I'm renting a VPS around $5 a month to have it on all my devices.
But to be fair, I'm also hosting other things on that VPS (SearXNG is very light), so it's multi-purpose.
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I use Brave Search, it's quite good imo
Brave
Its surprisingly good... I rarely need anything else
Qwant and kagi have been a great pair. Brave search was good, but they had some controversy a bit back.
I use Startpage, it’s based within the EU and a proxy for Google results!
Vpn block...
What?
It was mentioned in OP’s post: Startpage tends to block those coming in from VPNs.
Why wpuld they do that? Unless they want to track you...
Because VPN IP addresses are commonly associated with malicious activity.
You’re right, I’ve totally read over it. Sorry :) Can’t imagine a VPN is blocking it as I use it all the time, with and without a VPN. Maybe it’s your VPN provider?
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I'm using nord and ive not faced that issue yet
Google results
which these days are very very bad! especially if you search something tech/programming related.
I tried using SearXNG for a few weeks but I kept needing to chance instances. I'm using DuckDuckGo for now.
You can self host for a better experience
I have to say I used Random Searx a lot, startpage as Backup. And as VPNs are getting mainstream, it gets a pain in the ass. Mullvad Leta sucks too kinda. Now I use duckduckgo alone and actually never need my specially configured SearXNG search providers, although useful.
I have to say, I use a lot of search engines. Using the "Add custom search" Addon on Firefox you can easily add any URL containing a search word to your browser.
I maintain some lists of search engines that need updating.
I don’t want to use Brave Search for a number of reasons.
Mind sharing? I'm curious because I switched to DDG several days ago, after a good while of using Brave. My reasons were:
- defaulting to Moderate safe search every couple of days
- inability to provide me with good results for simple '[word] wiktionary' queries
- having to block some elements of their result templates manually, using their own browser's filtering feature (featured snippets, definitions etc)
- poorer search results compared to what they were a year, two ago
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.
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.
A random thought
Do we really want search engines ?
Or, do we want AI to tell us the answers to our questions?
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….
Considering how often chatGPT gives complete and utter bs answers, I think I'd rather find the info on my own.
Let me go ask chatgbt for the answer, hold on one second.
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.
tbh im not sure but if you want google results with safesearch try resulti
I use MetaGer as my daily driver and you.com for deeper niche searches
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.
Easy add it to your search engine list in your browser
https://andisearch.com/?query=%s
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