I’ve been using duckduckgo lite as a primary search engine on my main profile. On other profiles I’ve mostly been using searXNG. Problem is, searXNG isn’t good for sophisticated results. Most search engines I’ve used yield wildly different results. I was fine with using duckduckgo lite as from what I’ve gathered is still the second best search engine after brave search. Duckduckgo how ever does engange in (minor) censorship, and the straw that broke the camels back was when duckduckgo started feeding me microsoft ads. I know they ddg has been riding microsoft’s meat for awhile now but this is just too far.
Startpage is good for results, but is still limited by what google decides to show. This can be good and bad, as google does censor certain topics. It also isn’t on-par with other private search engines, in terms of privacy. From what I understood, It censors Tor ip’s and collect (anonymous?) analytical data.
Then there is MetaGer. I enjoy MetaGer, but, it has ads. These ads are… not subtle. For example when I search ‘‘trees’’, I get 3 different ads at the top of the search results. I am in the process of setting up a pi-hole, but this is still very, very annoying. An very positive aspect of MetaGer is that it has a built in proxy available, which is very unique.
Brave search seemingly has the best of both worlds, it is fully independent and recently fully removed any ties to bing and microsoft, unlike ddg. However, I am concerned about their experiments with brave ads. Although this should not necessarily be a problem if I have a adblocker or pi-hole. It also does not seem like Brave collects any ‘‘analytical’’ data. However, they do get a strike on the board for being closed-source.
Honorable mentions to Mojeek, Qwant & Ecosia, but they are not what I’m looking for.
Brave should be commended not punished for their ads experiment. It’s an opt-in feature that’s disabled by default and a completely breath of fresh air in terms of advertising. Imagine of everyone adapted a system where it rewards both the viewer and the advertiser. That should not be a part of the discussion here really. All other remarks are apt.
I don’t think it’s been mentioned here yet but to those using StartPage, in 2019 it’s been acquired by an advertising company called System1 so please take that into consideration before using or suggesting it.
I know you already mentioned everything I’m about to say, but at the start of the week I switched from using Duckduckgo to Startpage but it still wasn’t getting me the results I needed so I switched to Qwant, and it has been surprisingly helpful. My main use has been searching for very specific problems dealing with 3D Printers with specific upgrades/modifications, etc.
It has been a while since I have updated my knowledge in the Search Engine world in regard to Privacy. I’m curious, what is it about Qwant and the others that aren’t what you’re looking for?
Kagi is really really good. I would choose it, if I could cough up the money.
Mojeek is slowly but steadily getting better. It is way better than a year ago. In some searches it performed great. It gives you the choice to take your query to Brave or other such engines if you don’t find what you want. I am considering using it full time.
Searxng is what I am currently using.
Went back to DDG after using Brave search for a while. A couple days ago, Brave image search doesn’t work for me any more. It just wants to directly redirect me to Bing or Google instead.
I use a self-hosted Whoogle at the moment, but Google Search results in general have gotten worse. I intend to switch to Brave Search once they have proper image/video indexing.
I’m not sure what you are talking about exactly with regards to Microsoft ads, but our ads are all contextual and private. From that page: “When you view search results (including ads), your searches cannot be tied back to you, either by us or our partners. How this works technically is we do not store any personal identifiers (e.g., IP address) with your search terms, and we also proxy all requests to partners through us.”
We also do not censor. I realized I caused a lot of this confusion but I subsequently authored our News Rankings help page which explains exactly what is going on, and it is not censorship by any means. From that page: “when we apply our own ranking signals we do so in a strictly non-political manner, meaning we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings.”