TL;DR - which privacy-focused search engine do people recommend, preferably one that can also easily be used as a default option in Safari?
I ditched Google in about 2016ish I would guess, and since then have used DDG as my default search engine.
As someone entrenched in the Apple ecosystem, it’s always seemed like a sound choice, as it’s one of the search engines built in to Safari on both iOS and macOS.
After spending a bit more time recently playing around with and updating my Docker containers, I started hosting a Whoogle container, which seemed to work pretty well, but I don’t see many out there talking about it, so not sure how good it actually is. I then tried a SearXNG container, but either had it misconfigured or just wasn’t getting many search results back.
At the moment I’m trying out Startpage, but I know there are potential privacy concerns since they were part-bought in 2019 by a US ad-tech company.
I’m also playing around with different browsers at the moment, flicking between Safari, Firefox and Brave. At which point I stumbled across Brave Search, which seems pretty promising.
So, which search engines do you all recommend?
UPDATE: Probably should’ve done a poll! But latest (if I’ve captured everything correctly) is:
- DuckDuckGo - 10
- Qwant / SearXNG / Kagi / Brave - 4
- Startpage / Ecosia - 2
- Google - 1
As to my other questions around browsers:
- Majority seem to use Firefox
- Some mentions of Brave
- One mention of Arc
I am currently trying my luck with Brave Search.
But I am to this day quite dissatisfied with any Google alternative, as they all either lack boolean search capabilities, filters for search results (e. g. by site or by image size) or a combination of both.
Bing claims to support the site parameter and boolean searches, but it simply doesn’t work (go to the second page, if needed): https://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Awikipedia.org+Linux+OR+Chicago
Same for all the other alternatives I’ve tried to use. I am honestly wondering how people are able to find anything with, for example, Bing or DuckDuckGo …
Are you only doing simple searches, like “nearby restaurant”? How do you search for something that has multiple valid names (OR) and you want to limit search results to before:2015, if the search engine doesn’t support search operators?
Someone pointed me in the direction of these guides:
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax/
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/advanced-search-options-b92e25f1-0085-4271-bdf9-14aaea720930
Yes, but it doesn’t work.
So according to Bing’s documentation, the search parameters for this example are the same as Google’s parameters and my search string should work just fine.
But look at my Bing example: I am looking for Wikipedia pages that either contain the string Chicago or Linux or both. Instead of the expected result, Bing gives me results from pages other than wikipedia.org.
The exact same search works just fine with Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awikipedia.org+Linux+OR+Chicago
DuckDuckGo is even worse in my opinion, as it doesn’t support boolean OR searches at all.