Hi everyone, so I hear that a lot of are lost in choosing a good search engine apart from the popular ones, but I think I have the solution
The search engine I’ve been using on all my devices is named “Qwant” its French and of course European. Its private and fast, I’ve been using it and didn’t had any issues with it.
So yes I am also new here on Lemmy and just wanted to be useful.
SearXNG is the best of ALL worlds. You can get results from every search engines, there’s no ads, and it’s self-hostable
I just got it set up yesterday and it’s so good
With a private searxng instance searches still come from your single IP so if you use ie; google, bing, etc… You’re still being tracked heavily.
Unless you use a public instance where your searches are ‘lost in the noise’. But then most of the search engines will block it so it doesn’t work very well in my experience.
I’m of two minds of this. On one hand, like you said, all your searches will still track back to your IP address.
But on the other hand, if it’s a pseudonymous IP address, you might end up giving out less information then if you contacted the search instances directly. You don’t have to worry about scraping away cookies or using a specific browser or always being connected to a VPN. In essence, the self-hosted instance is your “VPN” for searches.
It would be nice if you could get your friends to also use your instance, but if not, I think a self-hosted instance for a party of one is not a meaningless venture.
I’m in learning-mode here, so forgive me if this is a dumb question: if I have my home server connect to a VPN for all outbound traffic, would that mitigate your issue with “your single IP”. Would that make it so the IP they see is my VPN provider’s, not mine? Thanks for any info
Thats better if you have your VPN change IP often, and also because VPN IPs are shared (unless you pay for a unique static IP) which means more noise in the traffic.
But if you have a dedicated VPN IP, it’s basically the same then because your data can be tied to you at that IP.
Noted, and thanks!
if you think that qwant is private, qwant has some bad news for you ☞ https://about.qwant.com/en/legal/confidentialite/
they share your information with Microsoft even with “No consent”
this is not the first time i see these promotional qwant posts here. Either qwant is getting these posted or people who claim to care about privacy don’t read PRIVACY POLICY
to be fair, that only happens when you click on one of the ads, which i think is fair
i see that you haven’t read their linked Privacy policy
To provide relevant results when we do not have the answers to your queries ourselves, we have a partnership with Microsoft to provide our search results and contextual ads based on the entered keywords and your geographic region.
For this purpose, Qwant can transfer the following pseudonymized data to this partner related to your query:
Search keywords, Information about the browser you are using, The first three bytes of your IP address or, in the case of a User Account, the IP address, The approximate geographic area originating the search on a regional or city level, The salted hash generated from your IP address, User Agent, and a salt changing at least every 3 months, A random token generated by Qwant (aiming to limit data cross-referencing).Additionally, for the security and reliability of our partner’s services (spam detection, automated activity, fraudulent ad clicks), Qwant may also collect and transfer your full IP address to this partner.
Finally, as part of providing new features, Qwant shares your IP address with Microsoft to provide you with contextual ads and better search results.
ah damn i had only looked at the tables in there, sorry
It has pretty good results in my experience.
Brave search also does, but it always wants me to complete captchas so I’m not using it anymore.
Brave Browser may be a bit problematic.
Yeah brave search can be used without the browser. But I can understand not wanting to use either given that info.
Brave Search is separate from the browser. I use it in Firefox.
Totally, but it’s the same company, no? Wouldn’t the issues with the ownership of the browser also pertain to the search engine?
I don’t know if it’s accurate to describe Qwant as “private.” There is a bit to be desired with their privacy policy, such as them apparently sending your IP address to Microsoft
https://about.qwant.com/en/legal/confidentialite/
There’s also this bizarre section
If you have not consented or are not subject to the Services offered, we automatically collect technical data… Salted hash of the IP address…, market segment of a query, date and time of the visit, information about the country and chosen language…
Anonymized by Microsoft after 6 months.
from youtube video “De-Google Your Life”
Ecosia has it’s own index with qwant so this is not entirely correct
they are working on their own index with Qwant, they current still both use Bing
I have understood they use their own index already, like Qwant, and Bing to add to it.
Ecosia also has AI answers and bangs, you can use #g to redirect to Google for example.
I don’t like that searxng says no tracking, yes the app itself has none, but the backend search providers still track the requests from the instance IP, so if you’re the only user I don’t understand how it’s any better than just using google/bing/etc directly with ublock origin.
Also, with qwant you can just use bangs.
Qwant is pretty good, but I like my self-hosted SearX better.
SearxNG is the shit
I’ve been using Qwant for about a month now on Vivaldi. I’m happy and see no reason to go back to Google full time. What I do miss from Google though is things like showing business opening times when searching
Yea I am also using Vivaldi too and I really like the freedom of customizations and its also European which is a huge plus and its privacy focused. I think Qwant and Vivaldi makes a great internet browsing experience in my opinion.
I tried switching to Qwant, but was forced to complete a captcha for every search. It drove me nuts, so I went back to DuckDuckGo.
i really like 4get, it’s proxy, and it has scrapers from most search engines available
Immediate captcha on my first search lol.
yeah that’s kinda annoying, it’s there to fight the bots… it will give you 100 searches per day, and you can check other instances that don’t have it
Just annoying that as usual it shows up on Firefox but not if I use Edge or Chrome.
I really feel like captchas single out Firefox intentionally.
i have been liking Qwant
Obligatory “check out Kagi”
“stop using Google, use a company that directly gives money to Google instead” 🤔
Kagi gives money to google?
anyone know what their plans are exactly in terms of switching away from bing?
also altough I smile everytime im not using google or bing directly anymore while getting these amazing results with that nice qwant UI:
it’s image search is my biggest complaint usecase wise. the results are small, non-scalable and theres no similar search upon focusing one result
anyone know what their plans are exactly in terms of switching away from bing?
They are working with Ecosia to build their own, shared search index, rather than be reliant on the corporate ones.
Thanks exactly what I was looking for. I wish they’d give more updates 😅
As I understand, it’s no small task to build or maintain a working search index. There’s a reason it’s mostly been huge, corporate entities that take on the challenge, and why smaller search providers tend to rely on preexisting ones.
So I applaud Qwant and Ecosia on their initiative, but also understand that it may take a while before it bears fruit.
