I used google for most of my life, for the past couple months I’ve been using brave search, but I still end up using google often because google images is far better than brave search images. I’m also worried that maybe brave search isn’t the best choice. What would you guys recommend?
Find a variant of Searx you like.
I use duckduckgo. It is Bing but with more privacy. You could try also searx, swisscows, startpage or qwant
I’ve been using DDG for a while but just got hit with an AI summary finally, like Brave and then Google does. It’s such a turn off. I trust the information exactly 0%. Definitely considering just using SearXNG full time now. I liked DDG a lot but I’m so fickle, it doesn’t take much for me to swap.
You can disable that. Here are two links that disable that. Add it to Firefox or Chromium through the settings.
Simple, only disables AI answers:
https://duckduckgo.com/?kbe=0&q=%sLong, disables AI answers and ads:
https://duckduckgo.com/?kak=-1&kax=-1&kbe=0&k1=-1&q=%sSteps to create a custom DDG search config:
- Visit: https://duckduckgo.com/settings
- Select the settings you want, for example dark mode.
- Click the “Show Bookmarklet and Settings Data” button.
- Copy the link, using my dark mode scenario would yield the URL
https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=d - Edit the URL by adding
&q=%sto the end, which acts as a placeholder for the browser to replace with your actual search query. Using my examplehttps://duckduckgo.com/?kae=d&q=%s - Last step is add it to your browser. May differ between browsers, but generally look in the search engines tab of the settings.
Thanks for the tips but it says that it can be disabled right on the summary itself. The issue isn’t disabling it for me. It’s that the information is bad and I don’t want a search engine that thinks this is useful. Sorry for not making that more clear. That’s what I meant by me being fickle.
does ddg not have its own search backend anymore?
nope, it was yandex + bing, now bing: https://www.searchenginemap.com/
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
My reading is that the classic search listings are coming from Bing and the the quick answer type stuff is coming from DDGs systems.
This is probably the best resource for keeping track of which search engine options exist and what their quality is like: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes
For a “fire and forget” option that doesnt require any configuration you cant go wrong with good ol DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com
If you’re okay with dealing with more configuration and breakage then Searx can be pretty powerful as its a metasearch engine that can search with every search engine you tell it at once and agregate the results(while proxying things to maintain privacy): https://searx.space (had decent luck with the https://search.sapti.me instance if you just wanna try it out without searching through a list of options)
Also all search engines are kinda bad due to SEO spam and “AI” generated images and articles polluting the results, consider using uBlacklist to help you filter out the trash from search results(think of it like ublock origin for search engine results), can use it for basically any search engine so no reason to not set it up: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
I also use DuckDuckGo. If I find I’m not seeing the results I want i just add !g anywhere and the search gets sent over to Google, though I don’t find I need to do that very often.
Anyone of the many SearXNG instances is your best choice for balancing privacy and quality results. It’s open source, sources multiple search engines which you can control, is anonymous, and provides solid results. Here’s a list of active SearXNG instances: https://searx.space/
I’ve really been enjoying Kagi. They seem to have a pretty good privacy policy as well. However Searxng is probably the best for privacy since it’s self hosted.
I self host my own SearXNG instance. I use that.
Me too! Surprisingly easy to set up from docker. Like, four commands?
Including setting up docker?
Setting up docker to host a couple of containers from Linux is only a couple of commands, depending on your distro. Basically, install a few packages, create a group for docker, add yourself to that group.
Harder in Windows, probably, but I’ve never tried it.
Start Page. Google results without the Google.
Or duckduckgo
In 2019, the advertising/data science company System1 became the majority owner of Startpage. Based on this, I’d say it’s worth finding an alternative to Startpage.
Oh really? I’ll look more into that thanks.
I saw people mentioning an open source and self hostable search engine (SearXNG) which is cool and I tried it out but it gives not very good results. I tried searching for specific sites and it would show anything but. But it’s fine for general info.
I still don’t think there is anything else other than startpage that is as private while giving good search results. I don’t believe that startpage is collecting data on users like google/Microsoft do and I don’t think duckduckgo is as good in that regard either. It still makes sense for startpage to be owned by an advertising company since it does show ads mixed with the search results. The difference is they are not personalised or tracked to you (so they say).
So if you have any evidence of System1/startpage tracking users and collecting personalised data on users for anything other than general usage and diagnostic analytics then I think it’s fine. If you do, then I will stop using and recommending it.
SearXNG: https://github.com/searxng/searxng
It enhances and respects privacy,
is open source and self hostable,
and queries multiple configurable search engines (google, bing, brave, duckduckgo, …)You can find a list of public hosted instances here:
https://searx.space/However I prefer to slap an instance randomizer on top, so each of my queries goes through another public SearXNG instance, for more privacy, and mostly, to bypass rate-limiting after frequent queries.
For this I use:
- On Desktop - GimmeASearX:
https://github.com/demostanis/gimmeasearx - On the go - SearX NeoCities:
https://searx.neocities.org/
- On Desktop - GimmeASearX:
Stop using search engines and start using ai. Especially ai that links to sources is much better than weeding out the heavily influenced search results. Using ai is like opening 10 search results finding the relevant sources and comparing them all to bother the information down to a digestible nugget.
Do you know which AI to use?
Every time i tried it, it gave me wrong information or combined outdated information with current one
I’ve gotten pretty good results from Perplexity. The responses contain links to sources, Wikipedia style, which enables me to verify the answers in the AI generated response.
Stop using search engines and start using ai
I will when we have AI.
I use Bing because it gives points at ~$5/month from letting it spy on you. Microsoft doubles their points to $10/month when you send to a charity. Using Bing vs technically/privately better options gets ~$120/yr sent to the FSF. I asked FSF and they validated that they get what MSFT says they send.
Regarding more privacy-marketed search engines, I perceive the privacy argument from corporate search as marketing. Any corporate search engine should be selling your data to maximize profit, even if you pay monthly.
Fsf?
Free Software Foundation
I am paying for Kagi. Has worked well and some searched topics had been human curated so the answers are right there in the results. But it also does a good job with obscure searches, although it seems it tries to alter the meaning or context in order to show more results.
Best feature is the ability to hide from the results shit sites like Reddit or Quora.
Same - I paid last year and it just expired, so I tried Brave Search, DDG and Startpage but they weren’t cutting it for me so I’ve just gone back to Kagi.
I use DDG but I’m always open to alternatives.
I have used brave search which was really good I really liked the ai search although i moved away from it after seeing how bad google ai search was (saying things like its a good idea to eat rocks due to not being able to recognise satire) and I managed to get brave to do the same thing with a different onion article so i dont really trust any ai search now. At the moment I use searx it’s incredibly private especially if you are willing to self host (I am not) and you have so much customisation you can use any search index so you don’t have to worry about bad results.
Qwant also seams really good although I haven’t tried it, same with ecosia especially if you like planting trees although I use an ad blocker so that doesn’t work for me.
Imo there are so many great free browsers it’s not really worth paying for a browser.
I also don’t recommend duck duck since it used to have a tracking deal with Microsoft. It doesn’t have it anymore but I think it’s enough to lose faith in it.
qwant and ecosia are both using bing, with the latter using google sometimes: https://www.searchenginemap.com/ map needs updating for that latter point
I don’t really see why this is relevant unless google or bing results are bad (and from my experience they are pretty good) since privacy focused search angines anonymize all search engine requests so you can’t be tracked by google or bing. Also that map really is outdated brave uses it’s own indexing now so it no longer relies on google.
