Heard some sketchy stuff about duckduckgo recently, found out about start page.many users?
Startpage was bought by an advertising company. I suggest to not bother with that search engine anymore.
Damn! Why do the good die young? Thanks for sharing, I’ll give it a miss.
Everything needs money to run.
That’s true but we’re here at privacy@lemmy.ml so people here only care about the privacy aspect and not how companies finance their services. If you still wanna use Startpage and risk your privacy then go for it.
Nothing new, but it’s still a privacy centred search engine, but, same as Google search, whose engine does it use, puts advertisings, related to the search at the beginning of the results. It’s annoying but not put in risk your privacy. You can check it by yourself, with Webkoll, UrlVoid, Blacklight, etc. There are no cookies, trackers, logs or other profiling crap in Startpage. Anyway there are a lot of other search engines out there which you can use, Whoogle, Andisearch, AstianGo (default search engine from the Midori browser, a FF fork, but better, FOSS), Mojeek, Qwant, MetaGer, DDG, if you have little children, the 100% family save Swisscows, if you want planting trees or support social projects, use Ecosia or Good search. All of these protect your privacy and don’t log your searches, nor track you. Sponsor ads, or context based, like Startpage has, instead on surveilling or profiling, to create incommings, are not a privacy or security issue, server costs money. If you want to avoid it, you must use a selfhosted solucion or trust a public instance (Whoogle, SearX) or use a search engine which recieve a commision when you buy something online (Andisearch) or similar methodes that do not compromise your data.
To avoid are Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc, which make money with surveillance advertising, logging your search and profiling you to sell your data to advertising companies, this is a risk and lack of privacy, not the other
I’d recommend SearXNG instead.
It now has engines for searching lemmy too
Aw, the instance I use doesn’t seem to have it (yet?)
It’s at least available if you’re self-hosting.
Ooh, gonna have to check that out
Just had a brief look, will look into it more later, but that looks really cool!
Do you have to host it yourself?
Nope. Nor should you, if you’d only use it yourself, since pooling is integral if you don’t want to be profiled.
There are public instances at Searx.space.
I take the opposite view - you definitely should host it yourself. Any public instance you don’t directly control can insert any sort of code they want to.
A cheap VPS, rented using Monero, with SearXNG on it ensures privacy.
If you do that, make it public, or else you can get profiled again.
Whoever wants to can profile as much as they like. My VPN’s always on and I rent the VPS using Monero.
That is the point, If you want to go really private, there is no other to self host on a own server. If not, it’s better to use any of the other “normal” search engine with a good reputation. the privacy it has you can check with the services above mencioned., and to repeat until boredom: important to read TOS and PP to avoid surprises. These are legally binding documents, that is, if they do strange things with your data, without specifying it in this texts, a ton of bricks can fall on them with million-dollar complaints.
Kagi is awesome. I strongly recommend giving them a try.
It’s now a better search engine in that VPN users don’t get thrown off after two searches anymore. But the fact that it’s owned by a data harvesting company means it’s a risk to use.
Lots of people mentioning Kagi. Sorry, but any engine that needs an account to work is not for me. They say you can pay anonymously, but none of their payment methods are anonymous. And $10 per month for unlimited searches?
I used it for quite a while
I switched to kagi recently and never been happier
Most search engines that claim to be private (StartPage, Qwant, etc) are fake and will try their hardest to sneakily profit from user data, with DuckDuckGo being the greatest example as they were caught selling user data to Microsoft, only stopping so when they were caught. The only search engine I would recommend is SearXNG. It’s feature rich and is primarily ran by privacy enthusiasts.
Searx and SearxNG are metasearch engines - front-ends to other, existing search engines. They still have to use commercial search engines (mostly) to run queries and get results.
The link you provide says otherwise though? Serving Microsoft ads now equals to selling user data? I’m pretty confused 🤔
Never heard of it, but something to check out for sure. I’ve been using Kagi and it reminds me just how far gone most search engines have become.
I’d consider paying but…. not that much 🤷🏻♂️
Fair enough, but it’s usually either pay or let yourself become the product. For what it’s worth, instead of having to append “Reddit” or other items to get proper results, Kagi actually lists useful results. And for the number of queries that I’ve run this month, it’s less than 1cent a search. Not having to shift through all the shit results is worth 1cent to me.
I used it at one point, but I found it slower than DDG or SearXNG
Go to MetaGer
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There’s proof they allowed Microsoft to use trackers though…I dig DDG as they were one of the first functional alternative search engines to Google with an emphasis on privacy, yet there are much better options today. I’m going to have to peep kagi based on this thread, but I’ll need to be strongly convinced to switch from SearXNG.
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Being an accident would be news to me. Since it sources Bing for results, you’d think Microsofts trackers would be a focal point of their privacy approach. Sleeping on trackers known to be present isn’t a good look either way.
