Heard some sketchy stuff about duckduckgo recently, found out about start page.many users?
Startpage was bought by an advertising company. I suggest to not bother with that search engine anymore.
Nothing new, but it’s still a privacy centred search engine, but, same as Google search, whose engine does it use, puts advertisings, related to the search at the beginning of the results. It’s annoying but not put in risk your privacy. You can check it by yourself, with Webkoll, UrlVoid, Blacklight, etc. There are no cookies, trackers, logs or other profiling crap in Startpage. Anyway there are a lot of other search engines out there which you can use, Whoogle, Andisearch, AstianGo (default search engine from the Midori browser, a FF fork, but better, FOSS), Mojeek, Qwant, MetaGer, DDG, if you have little children, the 100% family save Swisscows, if you want planting trees or support social projects, use Ecosia or Good search. All of these protect your privacy and don’t log your searches, nor track you. Sponsor ads, or context based, like Startpage has, instead on surveilling or profiling, to create incommings, are not a privacy or security issue, server costs money. If you want to avoid it, you must use a selfhosted solucion or trust a public instance (Whoogle, SearX) or use a search engine which recieve a commision when you buy something online (Andisearch) or similar methodes that do not compromise your data.
To avoid are Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc, which make money with surveillance advertising, logging your search and profiling you to sell your data to advertising companies, this is a risk and lack of privacy, not the other
Might want to consider hosting your own Whoogle instance instead?
deleted
There’s proof they allowed Microsoft to use trackers though…I dig DDG as they were one of the first functional alternative search engines to Google with an emphasis on privacy, yet there are much better options today. I’m going to have to peep kagi based on this thread, but I’ll need to be strongly convinced to switch from SearXNG.
deleted
Being an accident would be news to me. Since it sources Bing for results, you’d think Microsofts trackers would be a focal point of their privacy approach. Sleeping on trackers known to be present isn’t a good look either way.
I’m really put off by the fact a privacy centered search engine would require captcha for VPN users. It was annoying to use on MullvadVPN.
What about DDG?
I’d recommend SearXNG instead.
It now has engines for searching lemmy too
Do you have to host it yourself?
Nope. Nor should you, if you’d only use it yourself, since pooling is integral if you don’t want to be profiled.
There are public instances at Searx.space.
I take the opposite view - you definitely should host it yourself. Any public instance you don’t directly control can insert any sort of code they want to.
A cheap VPS, rented using Monero, with SearXNG on it ensures privacy.
If you do that, make it public, or else you can get profiled again.
Whoever wants to can profile as much as they like. My VPN’s always on and I rent the VPS using Monero.
