What’s the best alternative for ddg? They sold info to Microsoft & that’s a no-go for me. So what’s a good private search engine?

  • plsnotracking@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    Have you tried searx? There’s a lot of open source instances. If you want to use Google with some privacy there’s also whoogle. Tbh I haven’t tried any, just read about them. Hope this helps!

    • Rooki@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      I would recommend searxng its a little bit better and yeah.You can easily self host that too :) Its a meta (not the company) search engine. It requests multiple search engine. Its a really good way to aggregate multiple results from different search engine.

      • asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Isn’t that ultimately like a VPN though? i.e. a different server is making the requests to those search engines and forwarding results to you? Why not just use a VPN and access your favorite directly if you don’t care about aggregated results?

        • Rooki@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Then the thing is VPNs are the trojan horse themself. They know what you search, they know who you are. There are some exceptions, but in general they know those things. Its not like a vpn its like a proxy. It just proxies the content for you. From all of your wanted websites, you can easily self host it with docker.

            • Rooki@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              The thing is. One of them wants to IMPROVE your privacy one “PROMISES” anonymity. It doesnt make you anonym. It makes you less trackable and less biassed about 1 search engine. It is NOT to grant you anonymity. The one you can host yourself ( and the other you can self host. But its useless for its cause because you have to put in your data in the hoster aka vpn ).

              Searx(ng) is to IMPROVE privacy IMPROVE control but it does NOT make you anonymous, make yourself untrackable.

            • Rooki@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              10 months ago

              If you router your dns through it, yes it still can detect on what websites you were ( not directly the path like /comment/13232345 but the domain like google.com )

                • Rooki@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  10 months ago

                  But still then if you click on it like wikipedia.com it knows that. That is already enough to track you where you go.

                  And if you have enabled prefetching it will prefetch all the websites ( and domains ) on your search result page so with it a vpn provider can guess what you searched.

                  But still its a middle man and you need to trust them a lot.