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
  • @ech0English
    1•1 year ago

    First thing that comes to mind is are you running it on Host Network? That’s a requirement

    • schmurnanOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      No I’m running it on a bridge network with my other containers. And even the documentation shows SearXNG being run on a bridge network - see below, from https://github.com/searxng/searxng-docker/blob/master/docker-compose.yaml:

      searxng:
  container_name: searxng
  image: searxng/searxng:latest
  networks:
    - searxng
  ports:
   - "127.0.0.1:8080:8080"
  volumes:
    - ./searxng:/etc/searxng:rw
  environment:
    - SEARXNG_BASE_URL=https://${SEARXNG_HOSTNAME:-localhost}/
  cap_drop:
    - ALL
  cap_add:
    - CHOWN
    - SETGID
    - SETUID
  logging:
    driver: "json-file"
    options:
      max-size: "1m"
      max-file: "1"

networks:
  searxng:
    ipam:
      driver: default

      The only difference between my Compose and the one above is that they suggest using Caddy as a reverse proxy, whereas I’m using Traefik.