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
Your post may have just convinced me to try ddg. My problem with Google is that increasingly it does not give me what I am looking for and instead gives me what it thinks I should want. From your description it sounds like ddg is what Google used to be.
Pretty much. They deliver a couple of sponsored entries per search, but even those have been occasionally productive. No harm in trying for a while, you can always change if it’s not working. GL&HF!