It looks like Duck Duck Go is down at the moment. What is your second choice for privacy respecting search?

It’s like stumbleupon!

I have also discovered very interesting blogs or site that I have then added to my RSS feed. They also offer a lens to only look within the small web, which they index themselves I think.

Just not looking forward to when they sell to venture capatilists down the line, and everything becomes terrible.

Judging by their ethos so far, I don't think that's a goal. I'd almost say it's a non-goal.

What opinions can I ask? first time I've heard this

Nope. For that I use the bang shortcut feature to send it to Google.

One nice thing about that, is that you can use g as a bang, instead of !g. It’s a little thing but easier to type on mobile.

They use approximate network location for such requests, yes.

"chinese food" didn't trigger it for me which is understandable since it's a generic term, not a request to show chinese food restaurants near you but "chinese food near me" does show restaurants in my approximate vicinity as expected aswell as localised search results for tripadvisor.

In their privacy policy they claim that that's explicitly the only time they use data that could be considered sensitive in a search request.

There is a map search mode that does surface location aware results, after explicitly getting your permission to get your location.

Having your own instance can be bad for privacy, as all your searches come from your IP (hosted at home) or the same IP (hosted on a server). They might not be traced to you personally, but you might still get personalized results or your search may still be tracked, depending on how they track you.

That's circumvented when using it with some or better many other people. But then, you need to trust the admin of that instance.

Self-hosted is easy if you know a bit about servers. You need a domain pointing to a server. If it's the only thing hosted on that server and you have set up docker on it, you can just follow their instructions here to get it running in less than 5 minutes (assuming you run the default config and don't customize all of the settings for a while): https://github.com/searxng/searxng-docker?tab=readme-ov-file#how-to-use-it

Someone already gave an extensive comment about how to set things up so I will skip that part.

Good observation re: self hosting potentially reducing privacy. The way that I keep my privacy during self-hosting is to completely avoid search engines that track my IP address, and then, ideally, although the remaining search engines are less efficient than the likes of Google or Bing, the fact that the results are aggregated hopefully increase the efficiency of the results.

For my default searches, it uses mwmbl, mojeek & qwant

Qwant (france-based), startpage (NL-based), searxng (bunch of host options)

honorary mention to Stract which is currently totally useless because the results are so random, but hopefully in a few years it will be a proper alternative. they are indexing the web from scratch in order to not have to rely on existing data from other search engines (which is why the results are terrible right now lol)

Will do and i love your ethics.

First time I've heard of Mojeek. Why should I trust it more than any other company? Is there anything particular about its economic model or governance that makes it less likely to decide to be unethical?

if youre asking for the link, i use search.bus-hit.me, more instances can be found on searx.space

what?

Yeah, I believe that the common consensus here on Lemmy is that Brave is ran by an A-hole and shouldn't be supported. Secondly it's hated for injecting it's own ads and tracking into things aswell as the whole crypto thing.

If you've used Kagi, it has a feature much like "lens" to raise the weight of fediverse results too

That's fair, I can't say I've daily-driven it yet since I've still got my Kagi sub, but I'm thinking of defaulting it on my work computer to put it through its paces. It's done fairly well with some of my tests, but definitely seems to still be getting refined, I've noticed recent information can be difficult to find on it

I only just started using it recently, so i don't have a solid opinion yet, but it seems pretty good!

Yeah I noticed that, it's why I don't really use them. Astroturfed to shit.

EDIT: OMG unrelated but i'm so glad you wrote https://dessalines.github.io/essays/nietzsche.html because I got into arguments on hexbear over that guy being a fascist POS and it's so vindicating to read someone backing me up on that after all the gaslighting they put me through.

Contributing here with another sample point.

I did not find the mentioned link on either search engines’ first page of results.

DuckDuckGo:

StartPage:

I am not sure why a black bar appears when taking a full page screenshot of StartPage on Safari for iOS, but both screenshots are unedited and uploaded as-is.

Your page isn't blocked. I found it on DDG just fine. Second page, as the other commenter pointed out.

What else are you claiming gets censored? Would love to put it to the test myself.

Edit: and startpage has it on page 3. Are you claiming they censored you out, as well?

gemini protocol. thank u for prompting for clarification.

It's a proxy for Google, so it's the same search results that you would get on Google.