noai.duckduckgo.com

Startpage turned bad for me a couple months ago. I think it kept getting stuck in some “browser verification” nonsense. I’m not changing my LibreWolf settings for any search engine.

From a now deleted post, the info is by @[email protected]

This is a very well written an thorough article and I highly recommend reading it. If you don’t want to however, here is a summary of the key points:

• Brendan Eich’s anti-LGBTQ+ political involvement

• • Brendan Eich donated to anti-LGBT political organizations, politicians, and initiatives such as CA Prop 8 which banned same-sex marriages.

• 2016 — Brave Browser promises to replace webpage ads

• • Brave promised to replace ads with privacy friendly ads that would actually pay publishers and even users with a volatile cryptocurrency while keeping a cut for themselves. This never actually came to life and was criticized as “blatantly illegal”.

• 2018 — Brave runs a questionable donation campaign

• • Brave collected donations for popular content creators without actually involving or seeking consent from said creators. In short they accepted donations in crypto for creators, but would only pay out if it reached a minimum value of $100. When called out, Brave said refunds were impossible.

• 2020 — Brave injects referral links when visiting crypto wallets

• • Brave injected their own referral links for services such as Binance without informing users or asking permission.

• 2020 — Brave puts ads in user’s home screens

• • Brave turned their home screen image rotator into a place to serve ads, many of which were suspicious or crypto related.

• 2021 - Brave ships an insecure Tor feature

• • Brave added a Tor feature which exposed users DNS requests

• 2023 - Brave hides their crawlers to websites

• • Brave refuses to disclose their crawler bot to websites since many websites want to block Brave Search. Brave will only chose not to crawl a website if it also blocks Google’s crawler.

• 2024 - So-called “privacy browser” deprecated advanced fingerprinting protection

• • Brave removed a the Strict, Block Fingerprinting privacy feature from their browser.

• And More!

• • Brave paid for targeted ads for users searching for Firefox in the Play Store and ran a campaign to “Forget the Fox”. When called out on this the VP publicly denied it and claimed it was photo-shopped.
• • The VP of Brave, Luke Mulks, frequently posts about all things crypto, from NFTs to FTX, and uses AI-gen images to promote them. He also frequently re-tweets right-wing activists.
• • Brendan Eich’s feed also frequently contains right-wing content and Republican propaganda despite his claims to be “independent”.

Edit: corrected a mistake noted below.

DDG result quality is horrible for me, even for basic searches. But it is private.

Brave has better results. But it is shady. Potentially “less private.”

So… Pick your poison.

Mojeek is my first search, in in the first 3-4 links I don’t find the answer then

eu.startpage.com (0probably better than original) Or lite.duckduckgo.com (no JavaScript)

TL;DR:

Privacy: DuckDuckGo

Independence: Brave Search

Result quality: Varies

I tried brave, Ecosia and DDG after using Kagi.

While I went back to Kagi I found brave the best baring a few issues.

Ecosia and DDG were basically just Bing.

Brave while WAY worse on the odd query but it did the best on niche queries and reddit results were inline (love or hate them they are a great resource).

I’d recommend trying lots of queries out that you will use.

The best out there is Kagi , it’s not free but it’s what all search engines should strive for.

Decent but not as good is StartPage. Personally I don’t see DDG is that private. To many browser trackers…