As asked.

  • Frosty ( Frosty@lemm.ee ) 
    43·
    3 years ago

    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.

    • Crewman ( Crewman@sopuli.xyz ) 
      24·
      3 years ago

      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.

      • Atemu ( Atemu@lemmy.ml ) 
        1·
        3 years ago

        Just not looking forward to when they sell to venture capatilists down the line, and everything becomes terrible.

        Judging by their ethos so far, I don’t think that’s a goal. I’d almost say it’s a non-goal.

    • dmnknf ( dmnknf@lemmy.ml ) 
      10·
      3 years ago

      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

        • randomperson ( randomperson@lemmy.today ) English
          5·
          3 years ago

          They announced a few months ago that they would partner with Brave to surface Brave search results too. The CEO of Brave is known to be homophobic. People got mad, and Kagi’s response was that they are too small to be picky, and have to focus on search quality.

          • dmnknf ( dmnknf@lemmy.ml ) 
            6·
            3 years ago

            And theres the issue someone opened on their page suggesting to include a special card on suicide related searches telling people how to find help, and the CEO dismissed saying it can be just someone curious making the search and he don’t want to “set a precedent” on showing things the user is not actively searching

            • tetris11 ( tetris11@lemmy.ml ) 
              5·
              3 years ago

              I… think I agree with that though.

              I’m not saying there isn’t a grey area between being socially conscious or full blow libertarian, but I do think that a search engine operates much better when it is unrestricted by societal qualms.

              Look how stunted ChatGPT becomes with each new rendition, or how SDXL is far more restrictive in what it can express compared to its earlier SD1.5 models.

          • Atemu ( Atemu@lemmy.ml ) 
            5·
            3 years ago

            And also, like, their partnership with one of the most immoral companies on this planet drive most of the search results quality from the very beginning (Google). You didn’t sign up for a morally perfect search engine.

            When people made such a huge fuss about the CEO of some minor index that Kagi also happens to use beside like 10 others being a douche, all I could do is shake my head.

    • Pixel ( pixel@beehaw.org ) 
      3·
      3 years ago

      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

      • kinttach ( kinttach@lemm.ee ) English
        3·
        3 years ago

        Nope. For that I use the bang shortcut feature to send it to Google.

        One nice thing about that, is that you can use g as a bang, instead of !g. It’s a little thing but easier to type on mobile.

      • Atemu ( Atemu@lemmy.ml ) 
        1·
        3 years ago

        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.

          • kinttach ( kinttach@lemm.ee ) English
            3·
            3 years ago

            So this is confusing. I did not know about the maps mode (thanks @randomperson@lemmy.today!). If you show the map and then press the “target” symbol to get your location, Kagi will prompt to enable geolocation.

            When using a regular search for “chinese food near me” I see results for a city thousands of km away. But if I select Maps first, then it shows my local area and I can search on the map.

            • Atemu ( Atemu@lemmy.ml ) 
              2·
              3 years ago

              Oh, yes indeed. Map mode would request accurate geolocation.

              When using a regular search for “chinese food near me” I see results for a city thousands of km away.

              Yeah, that’s an unfortunate reality of IP geolocation, it’s not very accurate to begin with and can be extremely inaccurate in some cases too.
              Does Google (without a login) have the same issue with your public IP?

              Perhaps when a location query is detected Kagi could show a little button to use accurate geolocation instead. They seem to be pretty on top of little UX issues like these, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they implemented a solution like that if you opened a feedback thread.

  • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org) ( user224@lemmy.sdf.org ) English
    17·
    3 years ago

    I use startpage.

    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.

  • kaputter Aimbot ( kaputter_Aimbot@feddit.de ) 
    11·
    3 years ago

    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.

    And it was initially founded in 1996!

    _Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer_

    It currently supports the following languages/regions:

    Dansk (Danmark)

    Deutsch (Österreich/Schweiz/Deutschland)

    English (Great Britain/Ireland/Malaysia/USA)

    Español (España/México)

    Suomalainen (Suomi)

    Français (Canada/France)

    Italiano (Italia)

    Nederlands (Nederland)

    Polski (Polska)

    Svenska (Sverige)

    _Source: https://metager.org/lang_

    There is a TOR-hidden service too:

    https://metager.org/tor

    It is open source:

    https://gitlab.metager.de/open-source/MetaGer

    And other useful features, for example:

    That you can hide yourself behind our proxyserver just by opening the result anonymously? Use “OPEN ANONYMOUSLY”; this also affects the following links.

    _Source: https://metager.org/tips_

    Alternatively I use some SearxNG-instances, preferably hosted in the EU:

    https://searx.space/

  • Zicoxy3 ( Zicoxy3@lemmy.ml ) 
    10·
    3 years ago

    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.

    • Myaa ( Myaa@beehaw.org ) 
      2·
      3 years ago

      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.

      • Nyanix ( Nyanix@lemmy.ca ) 
        2·
        3 years ago

        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

      • lud ( lud@lemm.ee ) 
        1·
        3 years ago

        Do you have a list of other countries atrocities?

        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.