TL;DR - which privacy-focused search engine do people recommend, preferably one that can also easily be used as a default option in Safari?
I ditched Google in about 2016ish I would guess, and since then have used DDG as my default search engine.
As someone entrenched in the Apple ecosystem, it’s always seemed like a sound choice, as it’s one of the search engines built in to Safari on both iOS and macOS.
After spending a bit more time recently playing around with and updating my Docker containers, I started hosting a Whoogle container, which seemed to work pretty well, but I don’t see many out there talking about it, so not sure how good it actually is. I then tried a SearXNG container, but either had it misconfigured or just wasn’t getting many search results back.
At the moment I’m trying out Startpage, but I know there are potential privacy concerns since they were part-bought in 2019 by a US ad-tech company.
I’m also playing around with different browsers at the moment, flicking between Safari, Firefox and Brave. At which point I stumbled across Brave Search, which seems pretty promising.
So, which search engines do you all recommend?
UPDATE: Probably should’ve done a poll! But latest (if I’ve captured everything correctly) is:
- DuckDuckGo - 10
- Qwant / SearXNG / Kagi / Brave - 4
- Startpage / Ecosia - 2
- Google - 1
As to my other questions around browsers:
- Majority seem to use Firefox
- Some mentions of Brave
- One mention of Arc
They address this on their website and go in further detail on their privacy policy. You’d have to read through that to decide if they do enough to earn your trust. But in my opinion not having any advertising removes most of their incentive to try to collect user data. I suppose there could be a temptation to collect the data to resell, but since a large portion of their income relies on the reputation of being a search alternative that has a focus on privacy I feel the risk to their reputation would be greater than whatever revenue that would generate.
Of course there are all kinds of companies that flew too close to the sun and sold out user privacy for a Coke and a smile. I’ve decided to go with Kagi and have been very happy with them so far. If they ever sell out I’ll cash out, but they seem to be the best option for me right now.