I heard a lot of bad stuff about Brave and their CEO lately and am now unsure if the search engine is any good? Do they censor stuff? Is any data collected? Can it be considered private?
If you’d not recommend it, what are good alternatives and why? I was a long time duckduckgo user before, so anything similar to it or brave search would be great. I’m not into self hosting.
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!
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”
Brave is one of the more privacy-centric search engines. I don’t think it is the best on privacy, but it is pretty good.
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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 search engine is 100% trustworthy, unless self hosted (even then im not sure)…
Brave is alright for normies and maybe as a secondary browser.
I’d try a SearX instance or SearX.be and use FireFox or Librewolf as a browser, at least as a primary way to look things up.
I use a lot of search engines, none of these are Google, Bing or Brave. I use mainly Andisearch as primary search and Mojeek as second (both are between the most privacy protecting search engines out there). Apart some others (Qwant, DDG, Startpage, MetaGer, and some specific ones for news, images, resources, Url Checks, etc. and interns from social networks)
Metager.org could also be a good daily drive
No. Use Qwant instead.
Just gave it a try… Doesn’t appear to work for browser default search settings? I do a search and see results for about 2 seconds before it then shows their search page. I used
https://www.qwant.com?q=%sfor the query. Liked the search results I tested it with but not being able to use the search bar for quick searches is a deal breaker for me :(Nah same results :( maybe Firefox nightly mobile problem?
Must be. I had difficulties with it at one point, and I ended up living at the URL from some search results and was able to figure out what it wanted. I thought the missing slash might have been your issue.
