I recommend startpage.com over duckduckgo. It provides at least the same privacy as DDG while having generally better results because it uses google's results instead of bing's.
Edit: The ultimate search engine though, as mentioned by macattack, is SearxNG because it combines privacy with every other search engine and even allows you to mix and match your result sources.
I got it not too long ago, and I love it. The results are good, and the features are what i wish all search engines had. Just not looking forward to when they sell to venture capatilists down the line, and everything becomes terrible.
In the meantime, everyone should check out their Small Web intiative.
Gives you a random blog or small website. There's some really good articles I would have never read otherwise.
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.
I used to pay for kagi, but their CEO have some opinions that I absolutely hate about how to handle some issues, and this was a deal breaker for me. Nowadays I'm using searxng
does kagi spit out location-relevant information? that's something I've really missed on startpage, I like being able to just google "chinese food" and have the restaurants near me spit back out, and if a privacy-centered search engine can return a result comparable to something like google there that'd make me real happy
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.
I self-host searXNG, but you can use one of the public instances as well. My understanding is that it is more secure because you're search results are commingled with whoever else uses the instance, but you also can use something like libredirect to further distribute your search results across various instances for further security
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
Also a bit unrelated, but I just found that Gigablast shut down 10 months ago. And also this (a bit earlier) comment from the author: (source)
Yeah, Google forced my search engine basically out of business. I had ixquick.com as a big client at one time; I was providing them with search results from my custom web search engine. Then their CEO called me one day and told me he was cancelling, even though he'd been a client for over 10 years. He said it was because of some change Google had made to their agreement. Ixquick needed Google's results and ads for their startpage.com website, and, even though my results were shown on their ixquick.com and later ixquick.eu sites, apparently Google wasn't good with that.
duckduckgo is a US company and the CEO is the previous founder of The Names Database. i don’t know how anyone trusts it when there are so many EU alternatives
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)
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?
MetaGer is a metasearch engine focused on protecting users' privacy. Based in Germany, and hosted as a cooperation between the German NGO 'SUMA-EV - Association for Free Access to Knowledge' and the University of Hannover, the system is built on 24 small-scale web crawlers under MetaGer's own control. In September 2013, MetaGer launched MetaGer.net, an English-language version of their search engine.
That you can hide yourself behind our proxyserver just by opening the result anonymously? Use "OPEN ANONYMOUSLY"; this also affects the following links.
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.
I don’t think this should be downvoted. Brave Search is one of the very few search engines that is building its own index.
DuckDuckGo and Startpage are both great, however DDG uses results from Bing and Startpage uses results from Google.
We need proper competition against these big tech giants, and Brave Search is one of the few alternatives which is attempting to provide it. Mojeek is another search engine which uses its own index.
I've used DDG for years but I'm worried that Microsoft has some power with them. Also that its headquarters is in the US, where there are hardly any laws that protect the user.
I used Qwant for a season, based in France, but he asked me to remove the browser's ad blocker.
Since then, I use a SearXNG instance, waiting to mount my own. Very happy.
I really want to like stract but I can't get it to give me good results. I typically search for programming related things and it has difficulty pulling up relevant information regarding things like documentation and posts regarding the issue.
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 used to use DDG until they started censoring results.
I use Brave Search and Startpage. The latter is basically just a private Google proxy with some cool features and the former is fully independent, private, aesthetically appealing and has nice optional AI features.
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.
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.
Also the fact that one single website does or doesn't show up doesn't prove anything whatsoever. Of fucking course the search results varies and you can't seriously except a small website like that should be guaranteed top spot in every search engine.
And it's not like there aren't a lot of other results showing us atrocities.
Btw, it does show up if you search for: "list of us atrocities dessalines", "list of atrocities commited by American authorities", "list of atrocities commited by Us authorities".
It even shows up on the second page if you search for "list of us atrocities" the same is true for Bing.
I have started using Yandex recently and so far, it is decent, but no different than DDG. The minor annoyance I have is that some links and text are in the Russian language.
gemini search engines are not so bad for likeminded folks with likeminded topics.
ex: 12 results!
vs searching windows how to pay for windows. 0 results. srry. gemini is small.