Private search engine comparison

**DuckHook** · April 1st, 2021

For the past week, something has been nagging me about Startpage. Going through some of my old links turned up this: https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage...acy-one-group/

Perhaps a re‑think and a greater measure of investigation is in order. I won't jump to the conclusion that they are evil, but accepting investments from an egregious data‑profiler and installing their head honcho onto your board certainly smells awful.

**makitso** · April 1st, 2021

I also use DDG but it uses Bing search which does not give good search results.

**Frogs Hair** · April 1st, 2021

I started seeing unknown search providers showing up in startpage results thinking they were links regarding my query. When selected I found that it was another search engine with whole new set of links. Trying ecosia this week. https://info.ecosia.org/privacy

**DuckHook** · April 1st, 2021

Originally Posted by makitso

I also use DDG but it uses Bing search which does not give good search results.

You may wish to try SearX. I use it when DDG doesn't quite do the job. I've already referenced it in post #7 above.

You will first need to identify a gateway that you trust. This is probably the hardest part, as gateway providers tend to be little guys whose provenance is hard to research. An initial listing of such gateways is in the link in post #7.
Once you've navigated to the gateway you want, it's easy to add it as a new search option to either FF or Brave.
In FF, while in the search page of the chosen SearX site, you just click on the three dots in the URL bar and select the option: "Add Search Engine". It should now show up as one of your search engine options in Preferences → Search. There you can make it your default if you wish.
In Brave, once you've used the search page at least once, it will show up within Settings → Search Engine → Manage search engines. On my install, I had to mark it as "default" before it would shift from the accumulated selections at the bottom to one of the searchable ones at top. Even if you would prefer another engine as your default, you will need to declare the SearX gateway as the default to get it "registered" You can then change the default search engine to whatever you prefer afterward.

I use the SearX gateway offered by Disroot, but only because I have satisfied myself via XMPP chat and getting to know them that these guys are legit and won't log my searches. I would not recommend them to anyone else on the basis of my own judgment. I firmly believe that we all need to do our own research on such matters.

It's always possible to run your own SearX gateway: it's a FOSS package available from the repos:

Code:

duckhook@Zeus:~$  apt show searx
Package: searx
Version: 0.16.0+dfsg1-2
Priority: optional
Section: universe/web
Origin: Ubuntu
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>
Original-Maintainer: Johannes 'josch' Schauer <josch@debian.org>
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug
Installed-Size: 104 kB
Depends: python3-searx (= 0.16.0+dfsg1-2), python3:any
Suggests: nginx, uwsgi, uwsgi-plugin-python3
Homepage: https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/
Download-Size: 26.5 kB
APT-Sources: http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal/universe amd64 Packages
Description: Privacy-respecting metasearch engine
 Searx is an internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than
 70 search services. Searx runs as a web service and provides a web interface
 that allows the user to do a general search (aggregating results from google,
 bing, yahoo) or search for files (piratebay, kickass, torrentz), images (bing,
 deviantart, google images, flickr), IT (github, stackoverflow, Arch Linux
 wiki), maps (OpenStreetMap, photon), music (youtube, spotify, soundcloud),
 news (bing news, google news, reddit), science (arxiv, wolframalpha) social
 media (digg, twitter) and videos (youtube, dailymotion, vimeo).

I've found that, as a metasearch engine, the results are excellent, since it agglomerates the results from many search engines (including Google, DDG and many others) thus providing the best of all of them. I might just switch from DDG to Disroot/SearX as my default.

One thing to be careful about: because it forwards your search query to other engines with the referrer tag, you may end up losing a certain amount of anonymity in the forwarding process.

Originally Posted by Frogs Hair

I started seeing unknown search providers showing up in startpage results thinking they were links regarding my query. When selected I found that it was another search engine with whole new set of links. Trying ecosia this week. https://info.ecosia.org/privacy

I'm curious about Ecosia too. Will compare notes with you in a week!