It's a really good search engine and I have no reason to doubt their claims about privacy and cencorship but I have to say no there because beside finding piratebay in the normal search results it's all just their claims and I don't know of any sientific study or similar that ever tested any of the claims. If you don't trust those promises self hosting SearX is probably a good option and I haven't tried it in years but Qwant is another one with their own index aka independent results.
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
3 points (100.0% liked)
Privacy
31914 readers
563 users here now
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.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
trustworthy
They are recommended on privacy guides: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/search-engines/#brave-search I generally trust privacy guides, although I don't use Brave Search.
CEO
Their CEO is anti-vax and homophobic. Brave Browser (not search) has had some controversy around including crypto, replacing ads with their own, and having had inserted affiliate links into the URL bar in the past.
censor stuff
Hard to say, the job of a search engine is to show you what you want to find.
data collection
There is telemetry that can be turned off.
Ive been enjoying the results I get through qwant.com searches; its not perfect but feels more like older Google (before enshittification)
Thanks for the suggestion. I'm using startpage.com and I'm kind of trying to leave the Google influence but not at the cost of efficency.
I hate so far the results provided by brave, ddg, and ecosia.
But this one... It looks promising.
I stopped using Startpage because they regularly limits service access to IPs reserved for VPNs or Tor and it was immensely annoying having to prove that I'm a human each time I searched for anything.
Have you also heard of SearXNG?
I’d be also curious to know what annoyed you about DDG or Brave search.
Yes, I'm familiar with SearXNG, but every time I tried searching for something complex on different instances, I would encounter the following error: "Sorry! we didn't find any results. Please use another query or search in more categories." I genuinely appreciate what they're trying to accomplish with that project, but I'm not in a position to test something if it doesn't demonstrate the same efficiency as a established product. Let's say I can't afford to be a beta tester right now.
To a lesser extent, I had a similar experience with Brave, as its results align more with what I expect from Google (and therefore, StartPage).
DuckDuckGo, when I tried using it as an alternative, never provided me with better results than what StartPage offered. I'd love for it to work for me, but I simply end up spending more time there than on other search engines.
A trick I've learned for when this happens with SearXNG is to add "!web" to the search query. It provides a wider range of search engines and images, which specific ones can be selected in the settings. Like all things software, it takes a bit to adjust to a new interface but SearXNG allows users to control a lot more of the functionality.
No.
Source? Your ass?
Source is the same level of reliability as brave saying it is trustworthy.
The source is "trust me bro"
Which means: no, it is not trustworthy. Hence my "no"
I moved away from Brave Search when they went 2+ months only offering Google or Bing for their image searches. I can strongly recommend digging into https://search.disroot.org though!
How is that different from other public searxng instances?
It could just be me, but I dig disroots outlook. They're a privacy-focused platform ran by volunteers in it for what seems to be all the right reasons. While on the other hand, I can't tell you much about the other public SearXNG instance options.