Hi everyone,
I’m choosing a default search engine and I’m torn between DuckDuckGo and Brave Search. What matters most to me:
Privacy: what’s actually logged, and can the claims be trusted? Independence from Big Tech: DDG partly relies on Bing, while Brave has its own index. Result quality: relevance for daily, technical and niche queries. Trust: track record, controversies, business model.
Which one do you use daily, and why? Have you noticed a real quality difference? Thanks!
I use mainly Startpage and Mojeek, sometimes Ecosia and Qwant. Not so for privacy, but by far the best for image search is Yandex (yes, I know). But anyway there is always needed to use several search engines + specific page searches for an deeper research. Respect privacy there are only few conditions, the search engine don’t log your searches (avoiding filter bubble), don’t use AI of big corps, no SEO crap and don’t use tracking cookies, given in most engines except Google, Bing and Yahoo. Privacy isn’t a main problem in other engines as these and finish when you visit the searched page, where the protection from any search engine finish if you do it without proxy or VPN.
I stopped using DDG because it kept steering me to articles that were rehosted with paywalls by MSN instead of the actual source of the content.
I use Brave mostly, because they at least pretend to be private, and I actually get some decent results.
Unsurprisingly the best results come from Kagi, the paid service, primarily because they let you cater the results to your preferences. You can blacklist certain sites, prefer others, and even search the “small web” for blogs and such from smaller creators, and the Fediverse at large.
Why pay for some company to watch over you and your searchs? If you want real private searching it comes down to searXNG!
SearXNG is not absolute privacy either. They don’t each have their own index.
No one pays “for some company to watch over you”. The reason why you pay I already gave: because it’s better at what it does.
Kagi in general, and if I feel extra strongly about privacy, I use Privacy Pass mode which is cryptographically guaranteed private.
I’ve been using DDG as my default for probably longer than I ever used Google, so I’ll share my thoughts on it
What I like:
- Nice UI with plenty of options
- Optional AI features
- Great image search with tons of filters and an AI slop blocker that works reasonably well
What I don’t like:
- Localized results are not good (Startpage might be better for those)
- No LLM search API, so I use Brave API for that
They’ve had controversies in the past, but I’ve not heard of any in recent years tbh
For LLM I use open-websearch which supports a ton of search engines
SearXNG is a little tricky to set up, but worthwhile. If you’re lazy, I trust DDG over Brave any day of the week.
I went from the Google to Ecosia and then searXNG. I guess I left ecosia before they went on the big AI trip.
Daily reminder that the majority of alternative search engines get their upstream results from Bing or Google. As part of their agreements with Microsoft and Google, they may share some information with them. This is not a secret or anything; you can read it all in their terms of service.
Also a reminder that most of these search engines are black boxes. They’re all closed source and all we have is their “just trust us” promises of privacy and security and none of them have been audited by trusted third parties as far as I am aware. At this point, just use the one that most closely aligns with your personal values and ethics.
“Just trust us,” on the promises of privacy is pusing it, they are all openly sellling your information.
If you do any self-hosting, hosting your own instance of SearXNG is a much better way to go. No AI and you actually get results for what you search for. It pulls results from all the other search engines and you can choose which engines you want in settings, and it masks your IP so the other search engines don’t see where the requests actually come from. But even if you don’t self-host, SearXNG is just a much better privacy respecting search engine anyway.
There is a new Linux distro that includes hardened Zen browser and a tool to set up SearXNG locally. There is also an option to have the searches run through three TOR relays. It makes it all super easy to setup if you’re not someone who is self-hosting other services.
Hmmmm, interesting. What is the name of this distro, if you don’t mind me asking.
Odyssey Linux https://odysseylinux.org/
I just started self hosting a Nextcloud instance and I’m absolutely going to look into using Searx on it now. I forgot that was a possibility.
Be careful; one project turns into two, which turns into 3, which turns into a lifestyle! I use searXNG and have a wireguard instance into my LAN so that I can access the nth service I just set up that I cannot believe I have been living without when I am away from the LAN!
May I also suggest pihole be in your list of things to try out, or adguard home if that is they way you swing I will not judge. Once you get your ad blocking setup you will really start noticing the ads in other places and you will then need to go further into ad blocking, when you decide to get your own domain name may I suggest you find a provider that offers a wildcard email option, if you need a free trial service just a little longer create a new account with a new email address or if something gets spammy just have things sent to that address either bounced and deleted or just deleted before it gets to your inbox.
And then you find Home Assistant and don’t stop until you literally have the lights automatically be precisely on you and only you, wherever you go in your house.
I am in some self hosting lemmy group, I was given so much heck for still using ring, I needed to fix a motion sensor flood light when I figured it out and told people what I had done I got so many downvotes.
I get it ring is not good, but I have a vLAN (10.6.66.0/24) that does not have access to the WAN.
I run my containers through Tailscale to be able to access my services away from home. But yes, you’re right one container turns into adding another container and on and on. But its a better way than depending on other services that spy and track, etc. I still have a lot that I need to learn and add to the server but for the most part it accomplishes everything I want when I decided to start a server.
I use wireguard on my openWRT firewall, any ISP firewall/modem/router is a joke.
Yeah, I actually want to learn to build my own router and learn to set up openWRT, etc. Its a fairly new field to me but I know its something I need to learn. ISP routers are definitely a joke.
Yep, highly recommend it. Its easy to setup, especially if you already know a little about self-hosting.
DDG has a no ai version which is what I use.
It also has a lite version - https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite
Or the HTML version which I think looks nicer. https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/
You can add this link as a custom search engine to your browser. https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=%25s
I tried NoAI DDG vs Lite vs HTML. Why do NoAI and Lite have identical results while HTML is similar but might be reordered or have one or two different results?
Or the HTML version
Thanks for this! HTML version is clean af
I use qwant, mainly because its european. The quality is not that good imo, but its ok for my usage
Same, cause its European and it also is building its own independent index!
Yes. But it’s the only one, who refuses to work if you try to use it without JavaScript. So ddg for me + canvasblocker on firefox / brave browser which also blocks your fingerprint. (But since brave is a an AI and crypto company, i must say… Trust is not what i have a lot of)
What are typical server requirements for search ng? Especially storage wise?
I run searXNG on a pi 5 with a bunch of other services, it works great.
Edit: the pi 5 has a NVMe drive.
You don’t need much at all if you’re asking hardware-wise. Depends on what you want to host but I run jellyfin, searxng, slskd and many other containers on a small Intel CPU and 16 GB of ram. I run all of my containers in docker-compose and have no issues. Storage wise, all of my containers run from a 1 tb ssd, the containers themselves only store your config files, etc so you don’t need much storage for that. If you wanted to run like Jellyfin for media then you would probably want more storage.
I use Firefox with Brave search and DDG as a backup. On my iPhone, brave doesn’t always work on Firefox so it redirects to DDG. For what I researched, brave search is more private than what they getting caught for on their browser.
Show me your research. Cite your references.
Oh here’s my other comment with NYT article.
The article also has this… https://www.theverge.com/tech/1024588/brave-lawsuit-ai-scraping-new-york-times
Ok…
Ok. Give a few days to get back to my computer and look through my history. Not saying I’m correct either.
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Yeah I know. Didn’t saying about that though but ok.
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They may be more secure than others, but they been catch too many times stealing data. Privacy isn’t their strong suit.
The New York Times sues Brave web browser for AI scraping and bypassing paywalls
Firstly: The company, and especially its CEO, have a shady history which makes trusting them difficult.
Secondly: Their browser further promotes Google’s browser monpoly. For some of us that is a huge downside.
Why this hatred? And where does it come from?
The CEO donated money towards preventing gay marriage in California.
The company has some questionable businesses, for some the simple fact that its chromium based is enough.
So what the alternative ? Especially for phone i think there are no browser that block ads & tracker. Also you can’t use extensions
Canvasblocker prevents fingerprinting - which is nice. https://royfish.dev/fingerprints-are-the-new-cookies
I run Fennic with all my normal Firefox extensions, I’m also pretty sure Vanadium blocks most stuftlf but I’m truly not sure.
Ironfox is a privacy focused Firefox fork
Setup a VPN into your LAN and self host searXNG
Ironfox as mentioned and also Titanium browser which is built from Vanadium browser if you aren’t on GrapheneOS. Both block ads and allow extensions, especially the ublock origin extension.
My process is open in IronFox, if it doesn’t work open in vanadiam.
It’s a browser made by a company whose main business is advertising.
At one point they were trying a model where they adblock everything, but show you their ads instead. And then hold the money it made hostage untill the owner of the site you saw it on makes a contract with then to get paid for your ad viewing time.
But in general - an advertisement company making a browser is suspicious on so many levels…
Brendan Eich has some of the wrong ideas
