Your guide to finding a new Search Engine service and supporting European companies!

Daily reminder that

Brave's CEO donates to homophobic organizations and
Brave is connected to the BAT pay-to-surf scam

Don't use Brave.

Brave is based on Chromium and therefore helps contribute to Google having hegemony over web standards.
Always use a Firefox-based browser, even if you think Mozilla sucks.
- At least until Ladybird is ready. I hope they are not under too much pressure to rush things so we get a truly independent web browser.
- What about on iOS where it's all forced WebKit?
- What about Vanadium?
Yup! It is noted in the highlighted text in red. I've had several people respond that they didn't know about it, and would be making the switch away :)
- Never had a good feeling about that one.
Also reminder that StartPage is majority-owned by American ad company Sytem1

stop promoting brave. oh my god it's 2025 how good is their propaganda... they were never cool.

Worth noting about Startpage: they're part of System1, an American advertising/marketing company. Sytem1 claims that privacy is one of the biggest focuses though. Make of that what you will.

They're basically all compromised in one way or another. 😞

For Search, it is about finding the least bad option and hope that they will become more independent. Mojeek (fully independent but poor quality) or Qwant (building own index, but dependent on Bing)

What kind of storage space does it take up, and how good are the results?
looks really good, something to rewrite in Rust some day!

Not a search engine, but last week I learned of the European Open Websearch project, which builds a new free and open search index. It should already be ready to try out. Hopefully we will see some search engines implementing this soon.

For now I’ll stick with SearXNG, it’s among the first things I get up and running when I distro hop, but I’m glad there are other non-US options to try.

yeah I wish decentralized search engines were more common

I recommend Ecosia!

Very strange to put Kagi as “less private” when it’s the only non-self-hosted option that allows for completely private searches with their Privacy Pass tokens. You can access them with Tor, pay with crypto (not really that private though), and sign up with a fake email. https://kagi.com/privacy#anonymity

It isn't marked as less private. It is grayed out because it is not based in Europe. I personally use them as I find them the best option with what is out there.
- The text at the bottom says “kagi doesn’t collect any identifying data, but does require an account, so it is considered less private than the alternatives”.
Bitcoin isn’t private at all. It’s a very transparent cryptocurrency.
- I didn’t say bitcoin and I called out not really private in my comment.

I changed to Ecosia when I last saw this chart. It's working really well and is my main search engine across all my devices now.

But now I'm considering moving to Mojeek if that's better for privacy.

Ecosia is based in the EU and it's working together with Qwant to build an European index. But Ecosia's mission is planting trees, and in order to do that they need revenue, which comes from targeted advertising.
- @Scrollone @cRaziman But I think it’s contextual advertising. If you search for “lawnmower” you get lawnmower ads.
Ecosia is a better balance between experience and independence. Mojeek sadly will be a hit in terms of quality of results.
- I switched from duckduckgo to ecosia based off your graphic :)

I've been happy with DDG for so long. Uuugh.

Honestly I shopped around a lot and tried various services for 7 days each. In the end I came back to DDG because it's the most useful engine to me. It delivers results I look for and doesn't get in the way.
As a result I'm not quite satisfied, but it will have to do for now.
It's a marathon not a sprint. DDG is a big improvement, keep using it till you find something better that works for you

There are more open source engines:

Stract

Mwmbl

Stract is impressive I don't know what more people don't know about it

I really wish Kagi wasn't American. Kagi is such a good product, and I'd be willing to pay for it, but in no universe am I willing to pump more money into silicon valley.

Thanks. This I nice little guide, easy to suss and helps me figure my priorities.

Can't wait to get some news about Qwant and Ecosia new index

https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/

where is duckduckgo on this chart?

In the PrivateSearch section, but greyed out as they are not an EU based company.

Is there something like Weebly from Europe?

Sadly I don't have that answer on the top of my head. Maybe ask in !PurchaseWithPurpose@lemmy.world to whether others might be able to help.

How about just NOT supporting companies? Having an European company control what gets shown to you is not much of an improvement over having an American one do it...

There are decentralized search engines like SearXNG

The problem with that philosophy is that SearXNG is an aggregator, so if everyone moved to them... who would be paying for the engines that it aggregates?
I agree that no one should ever support a company. But rather establish a set of principles that you want the companies you use to follow, and show no loyalty if they break this.
It is actually the philosophy of !PurchaseWithPurpose@lemmy.world.
SearXNG is in the picture and it's one of the 3 recommended.
- Yeah I just find the title very weird, to me it makes more sense to choose a search engine because it respects your privacy than to "support European companies"
  I hadn't read the "Need help choosing?" part of the picture, so still oupsie on my part 😅 I wish it mentioned that it's decentralized... but considering it's aimed at people using Google, I guess that'd be like trying to convert people from twitter/reddit to mastodon/lemmy by geeking out about decentralization and ActivityPub. No one cares, aside from the people who are already using it 😅

I really wish Qwant would add the ability for me to Seach "1 eur to usd" and just get the results.

Along with "tsla" and "23 *3" and just get results.

This is a bit like Trumps tariffs, we need to cut everything off but there is no real alternative services. According this infograph, Startpage should be politically correct choice..

Qwant is the closest to being independent and Non-US.... I was recently told about StartPage being bought out by System1 (A US company)

Anyone noticed google brought back forum seaching again? I left google search way back just because that feature went away.

Either way I can't stand the AI answers I can't turn off.