cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/4448974
I’ve recently started using a self hosted SearXNG instance but I’m still using the search engines enabled by default (google, duckduckgo and qwant). What search engines do you have enabled or which ones do you feel you’ve gotten the best results with?
I can’t be bothered to self host a search engine. I just stick to duck duck go and I’ve tried some whoogle instances but I just prefer ddg at this point.
I’ve stuck with DuckDuckGo for years. It’s mostly gotten pretty good if you search in English. Other languages can be iffy.
DuckDuckGO for the bangs, with a custom !bang made for my favorite SearXNG instance; on which most of my ‘googling’ actually happens.
uBlock + (MetaGer or Searx or DDG/html[no JS]), via Tor 24/7. Onion available. Individually, hit and miss. In total, good enough for me. While DDG is okay (the default search engine for Tor Browser, Tails), intuitively I don’t fully trust it. Its no-JS version is acceptable.
Brave is surprisingly good
I use it daily. Just their account system with that fucked up login-by-email sucks hard. Especially since I have to refresh my session in multiple browsers on multiple devices.
(I use Premium for ad free search.)
deleted by creator
It is but unfortunately it doesn’t work in SearXNG most of the time
SearXNG, it was fairly easy to get used to coming from duckduckgo because
!!uses the same !bang search as ddg. (honestly !bang searches were the only thing keeping me on ddg)DuckDuckyGo currently, it isn’t bad. I’m a bit mad that there is no opt out for “improving.duckduckgo.com”, but you can even turn off their Advertising .-. So in short DuckDuckGo is good for normal up to advanced users who wants privacy, if you wanna go extreme private you probaly want smth else.
DuckDuckGo, I’ll switch to SearXNG as soon as it comes to Windows
There are public instances you can use, or if you want it locally hosted, there is wsl2. (Alternatively, join the dark side and install linux!)
https://coalition.blue :), hosted by your bud lol
Does a public instance ID or log users? I never even considered it because it seems risky, like I’m asking for backdoor access to my network
It does forward your real IP to the search engines so that google doesn’t flake out on me. But otherwise I am not logging anything haha
Sorry, this question was SearXNG specific, so MetaGer was irrelevant. I’ve never self-hosted it, but I’d say Brave. It’s supposed to have its own index (correct me if I’m wrong), so one can expect some diversity.
As for DDG, there shouldn’t be any problems if used via SearXNG. In general, there are a few comments about DDG here: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1164105.html and I quote:
Negative:
~1-2 years back they collected data on which search results their users clicked on by default with their own link-forwarder. After some outcry they removed that. Their “privacy browser” allowed third party cookies by Microsoft to track their users because DDG made a deal with them without telling anyone. When it came out Gabriel Weinberg released some BS statements.
Positive:
DDG doesn’t even have a Linux browser, but I love their Android browser. The DDG search engine provides results that are quite fine
Qwant for work and DDG for personal stuff
I am testing both for personal use right now, can you share your experience and how you came to the decision which to use for personal use and which for work?
Qwant has very similar search results to Google which I need for work. DDG is IMO more private so I use it for personal stuff.
Also Qwant has better results than DDG is languages other than English.
Brave Search and Startpage.
ecosia.org It care about my privacy and It also plant Trees from ad revenue.
Me too, though unfortunately I systematically ignore search results with the ad mark, so it’s not really helpful…
Presearch. I don’t care for the crypto features. (I already got Monero anyway) but the concept of a decentralized search engine is interesting.
._. It’s like decentralized VPNs, sound cool but aren’t.
I used to use searx for a couple years but it got too unreliable where it would fail to load results all the time randomly. Tried DDG and consistently ended up having to manually switch to google after the results on DDG just weren’t good enough (think troubleshooting linux issues and stuff, DDG would never find the obscure answer in a forum but google would).
Anyways, ofc the goal wasn’t to end up back at google so now I’ve been using startpage for the last few months and it seems to work great with no issues.
