I’ve seen a lot of discourse over which browsers we use and I myself have made the switch from brave to firefox. I still use brave as my search engine though, so… which do yall recommend? Is brave’s engine necessarily bad to use? I personally like its ui/theme.
Browser: Firefox because I can download its source code, use it, inspect, modify and share. All of these 4 freedoms make Firefox free, as in freedom.
Brave is non-free (closed source and not contributing to software freedom).I use Qwant (unfortunately, it only works in the EU) and site-local search (Wikipedia, ArchWiki, etc.)
All web search engines are crap, honestly. Maybe Kagi makes better, idk.
EDIT: Brave is free, apparently.
SearXNG. It’ll search all the other engines for you, in a privacy preserving way.
Caveat that it is only privacy preserving if you trust whoever is hosting it.
The solution to that is to host it yourself. A VPS with 2GB RAM would be would be more than sufficient for SearxNG, and you can often find those for around $15/year (see GreenCloudVPS budget KVM line, RackNerd sales, other hosts on LowEndTalk). Or, you could run it on a Raspberry Pi, especially now that Raspberry Pis are more accessible and not out of stock everywhere.
Be careful though. Self hosting is addictive. You start with one service on a low-end VPS or Raspberry Pi, then you outgrow the server, expand, and eventually end up in [email protected] with a full-size server rack in your house.
I suppose I don’t fully understand the model, but if you host it yourself, then wouldn’t that be significantly worse for privacy because you’re essentially forwarding your searches to multiple search engines instead of one?
Again, maybe I’m missing something, but SearXNG just seems like a bunch of privacy memes mashed together without actually considering the threat model involved very deeply. Ultimately all of your data needs to be forwarded to a search provider in the end, the only way you are gaining any benefit would be if you had a sufficient pool of other users to obfuscate who is querying what, with a host who you are able to trust with your data.
In terms of privacy, most people mean things like tracking cookies, where Google can track you across all your devices. With something like SearXNG, requests still go to Google, etc. but they don’t know who you are. There aren’t any tracking cookies for them to know who you are, and if you host it on a VPS, the IP the search comes from isn’t yours so there’s no way to correlate anything by IP address.
That’s not how cookies work, cookies are stored on, and controlled by, your client. Unless your client is sharing the cookie information across devices, google wouldn’t be able to track you across devices using cookies. Routing all of your searches to one machine allows google to build a richer search profile against you, rather than one scattered across multiple different IPs, device fingerprints, etc.
I assume you mean across the web? That too is more of a different issue, as it is unrelated to the use of google search itself, rather it is due to the existence of tracking services embedded into the websites you visit.
At the end of the day, your VPS is still having a search profile build against it, in a similar manner to just using your personal device. The main difference is that you are paying to have a specialized computer that serves as a single purpose google searching device. Perhaps it is more challenging for them to link that device directly to you specifically, but I’d honestly bet that it is achievable.
That’s not how cookies work, cookies are stored on, and controlled by, your client. Unless your client is sharing the cookie information across devices, google wouldn’t be able to track you across devices using cookies.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply the same cookie is shared between clients. Google place cookies when you log in, and they know all the cookies associated with your account. You could always do searches when you’re logged out, across all your devices, which would prevent them from tracking you cross-device. It’s pretty rare for people to not be logged into a Google service though, especially on mobile.
Routing all of your searches to one machine allows google to build a richer search profile against you, rather than one scattered across multiple different IPs, device fingerprints, etc.
At the end of the day, your VPS is still having a search profile build against it, in a similar manner to just using your personal device.
You can get a bunch of people to use it though (friends and family). I also doubt they build profiles just based on IP, since it’s not uncommon to share IPs given the IPv4 shortage. There’s also CGNAT where hundreds of thousands of people share a sml number of public IPs.
It’s pretty rare for people to not be logged into a Google service though, especially on mobile.
If that is the case then this conversation is somewhat moot isn’t it? But I also don’t really think it is all that rare for iOS users.
You can get a bunch of people to use it though (friends and family).
That’s a good point, definitely see a benefit then.
I also doubt they build profiles just based on IP, since it’s not uncommon to share IPs given the IPv4 shortage. There’s also CGNAT where hundreds of thousands of people share a sml number of public IPs.
Certainly, and because of that you don’t really need a proxy.
There are definitely some benefits to such a setup, I just don’t think it really is superior to a search provider that is built around not logging and selling your searches. At least not to the degree it gets recommended in these types of posts.
I use startpage which is a google proxy. So, it does what duckduckgo does with bing but with google instead. Searx is also a great option. Neither have their own crawler though
As for the brave engine there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. In fact, I’d argue it’s much safer than google, bing, or the proxies of each. While proxying you can still be fingerprinted. With brave only brave could do that and I trust them not to more than most.
You should be cautious though, as brave has had some privacy issues before injecting affiliate links which would track you when going to ecommerce sites.
Of course, the brave CEO is a piece of shit though. Full on covid conspiracy lab made Fauci plandemic ivermectin type stuff, believes that gay marriage should be illegal while donating to anti-gay orgs, and otherwise uses his position to further far right ideas. He also tries to fund weird micro nation projects with the goal of creating anarcho-capitalist heavens in the ocean. Think bioshock, but crypto bro. All around weird guy
All this said, I’d still argue from a privacy perspective brave is a perfectly reasonable option. The company has one privacy controversy but that’s better than the big two. I’ll stick to startpage though for political reasons, until I find something with good enough results that’s fully independent and moral. Currently looking at mojeek myself
Currently looking at mojeek myself
How’d you find us?
Oh shit, hey! Been a bit since I’ve said this but I’m happy to answer. I’ll admit I don’t remember exactly where, but I had asked about a privacy respecting independant search engine in a few matrix chats and separately did a bit of searching on startpage. It’s likely one of those two places I first found it but word of mouth through matrix is what convinced me to use it
I’ve been liking the service btw, I think you guys are doing something fantastic
thank you kindly, that is great to hear; we’ve got this new and even better (so far testing is showing that) algo ready to go too: https://www.mojeek.com/eval so hopefully it’ll be even more fantastic-er soon :D
I personally use Ecosia, it’s got a pretty decent privacy policy (esp compared to google/microsoft) and it uses Bing’s index so the results are pretty good. The main selling point is they use 100% of their profits for planting trees. The quality of the results is 99% of the time fine but if I ever get something I can’t find (or if I’m doing an image search) you can just add #g to your search to search google.
It’s overall a pretty good search engine by itself, but the fact it plants trees pushes it leagues ahead of the others for me
Do you run an adblocker?
edit: because if you do, then your searches don’t contribute towards the tree planting
No I block trackers but I do still get ads on Ecosia
ever click on them?
Yep! (If it’s relevant to my search)
They don’t get ad money otherwise (I assume that’s what you were getting at right?)
I was, yeah
I personally use Brave for most of my search aueries and don’t see anything wrong with it. If I can’t find something with it (which is rare these days), then I use SearXNG to get Google results proxied.
For work I still use Google tbh. It’s still really good for technical answers
I switched to Brave Search after watching Techlore’s video about it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
not duckduckgo from what i remember there was something with data and microsoft but you probably research thag before you trust me bcs i dont remember all of it. searchng is good, selfhosted or public instances. good luck
