I’ve been trying to find a good privacy respecting browser, but I can’t really decide on what to use. I don’t like the search results with Brave Search. DuckDuckGo shares my information with Microsoft and SearchXNG shows me NSFW images even with strict search on. I really like Presearch, but I’m not really sure what they’re about.
EDIT: After tinkering with the settings of my SearXNG instance, it seems to have reduced the amount of NSFW images. I think I will stick with SearXNG for now.
The best is to self host your own SearXNG metasearch engine.
Does that not defeat the point, because then they can see that the searches are coming from your location/internet?
I host my searxng instance on a hetzner vps so my ip is not leaked anywhere.
You can host if on a vps, use it behind a vpn, or make a whole group of people using it so you don’t know from who these requests were
The vpn, sure, but if you host it on a vps (and don’t make it public) then all of the requests are coming from the vps’s ip. This is private, but not anonymous.
I have started using a public instance because of this.
The problem is that you can’t customize default settings
and they get rate limited often.
Even with a VPN I don’t know if request are really that anonymous (anonimity is almost impossible to get)
This
What does DDG share with Microsoft?
It’s probably not that big of a deal, but I just don’t want anything to do with Microsoft.
So they only share when you click on an ad. I use an adblocker anyway, so effectively they’re not sharing anything. Or do I misunderstand?
I think it’s more of a trust issue.
Exactly. It’s sorta like all or nothing. If they share this, go figure what else. And maybe you misunderstood or missed some other parts.
I trust a search engine if I can turn JS off and still get results.
I just use Duckduckgo Lite with Ublock Origin, NoScript, LocalCDN, Libredirect, and Chameleon extensions on hardened Firefox fork.
A self hosted Searxng would also be a good option though.
I like DDG lite a lot, but I need to be able to search for images :c
Oh cool. I will check it out later =]
You can disable the ads in settings
You can combine search engine of choice with anonymity provided by TOR browser.
I can only say good things about kagi. They let you adjust your search results according to how much you trust a given source, and the business model makes sense. You pay them, they give you a service. Heck, if you pay for unlimited searches, they have an actual incentive to make you search less and make you find results quickly
Kagi uses russian Yandex and pretend it is neutral “business as usual”:
https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo
Depending on what you’re searching for, Yandex might be the better option though. For example, things relating to piracy are probably going to be easier to find on Yandex than Google, because corporations file billions of DMCA notices every year. It’s one of the reason I use SearXNG, so I know I’m not getting the corporate sanitized version of the web.
Another $10 subscription just to browse the web… I don’t think it’s for me.