I heard a lot of bad stuff about Brave and their CEO lately and am now unsure if the search engine is any good? Do they censor stuff? Is any data collected? Can it be considered private?
If you’d not recommend it, what are good alternatives and why? I was a long time duckduckgo user before, so anything similar to it or brave search would be great. I’m not into self hosting.
I use a lot of search engines, none of these are Google, Bing or Brave. I use mainly Andisearch as primary search and Mojeek as second (both are between the most privacy protecting search engines out there). Apart some others (Qwant, DDG, Startpage, MetaGer, and some specific ones for news, images, resources, Url Checks, etc. and interns from social networks)
Just gave it a try… Doesn’t appear to work for browser default search settings? I do a search and see results for about 2 seconds before it then shows their search page. I used https://www.qwant.com?q=%s for the query. Liked the search results I tested it with but not being able to use the search bar for quick searches is a deal breaker for me :(
Must be. I had difficulties with it at one point, and I ended up living at the URL from some search results and was able to figure out what it wanted. I thought the missing slash might have been your issue.
I stopped using Startpage because they regularly limits service access to IPs reserved for VPNs or Tor and it was immensely annoying having to prove that I’m a human each time I searched for anything.
Have you also heard of SearXNG?
I’d be also curious to know what annoyed you about DDG or Brave search.
Yes, I’m familiar with SearXNG, but every time I tried searching for something complex on different instances, I would encounter the following error: “Sorry! we didn’t find any results. Please use another query or search in more categories.” I genuinely appreciate what they’re trying to accomplish with that project, but I’m not in a position to test something if it doesn’t demonstrate the same efficiency as a established product. Let’s say I can’t afford to be a beta tester right now.
To a lesser extent, I had a similar experience with Brave, as its results align more with what I expect from Google (and therefore, StartPage).
DuckDuckGo, when I tried using it as an alternative, never provided me with better results than what StartPage offered. I’d love for it to work for me, but I simply end up spending more time there than on other search engines.
A trick I’ve learned for when this happens with SearXNG is to add “!web” to the search query. It provides a wider range of search engines and images, which specific ones can be selected in the settings. Like all things software, it takes a bit to adjust to a new interface but SearXNG allows users to control a lot more of the functionality.
Have also been using it for a while now, it’s the best alternative I tried so far. downsides are cost, closed-source, and my fear that they’re gonna take VC money in the future. So far, I can stand behind their offering tho. And the built-in feature to lower or raise results from certain pages is amazing.
I’ve been using Kagi for a few months now. Before that I used Brave Search. With Brave search I had to use the g! bang every few searches. Now with Kagi I have maybe used it five times in total. It has so much better search results!
Same here. The devs are super responsive to the community and actually care about privacy. The heated discussion on whether to include a suicide warning with certain searches is a banger read.
Their CEO is anti-vax and homophobic. Brave Browser (not search) has had some controversy around including crypto, replacing ads with their own, and having had inserted affiliate links into the URL bar in the past.
censor stuff
Hard to say, the job of a search engine is to show you what you want to find.
Wrong. It was planned, but as they got very negative feedback on that, they throw this idea away.
has had some controversy around including crypto
It’s optional, and crypto has it’s good and bad sites in terms of privacy.
data collection
I want to add, as far I know they collect just basic anonymous telemetry, so nothing to worry about and you can turn it off (Which I still recommend, if you care much about privacy)
If I try to stop using every company or service that has an obnoxious CEO spouting ignorant views I’m afraid I wouldn’t even be able to access the web. At the very least I’m glad companies like Brave give lip service to privacy to highlight awareness.
I moved away from Brave Search when they went 2+ months only offering Google or Bing for their image searches. I can strongly recommend digging into search.disroot.org though!
It could just be me, but I dig disroots outlook. They’re a privacy-focused platform ran by volunteers in it for what seems to be all the right reasons. While on the other hand, I can’t tell you much about the other public SearXNG instance options.
Wow, I had no idea this existed, it’s actually really well done. I’ve been using an onion searx instance for quite a lot now, I don’t really have any problems with it (other than the times it doesn’t work), but I will still add this to my list. You wrote in the about page that you dislike searx, why is that?
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