What is the most secure/private search engine? DDG, Qwant, StartPage?
I would say none of them is as private as people think. I suggest using SearX. It is completely open-source and it indexes proxied results from other search engines (you can manually select search engines in Preferences). I personally use searx.xyz and searx.ninja instance.
Just don’t give them any private info, or tracking info. Use a VPN, clear cookies, use blockers in the browser. Then you can use DDG or whatever you want.
Yacy is a peer to peer, federated, decentralized, private, free and open source search engine.
It’s worth trying it. It doesn’t rely on any evil company servers, just on the community and users computers. That’s great because it’s impossible that anyone spy on you.
https://swisscows.ch seems pretty good.
I use brave/tor with a vpn and duckduckgo. I also use always private browsing, so everything I “collect” goes away after I close the browser. I also use privacy badger, ghostery, ad blocker, and https everywhere.
I’d just go with the one that’s most convenient for you (excluding google). Then just use tor browser for most of your searches so you don’t have to worry about it.
DDG - wrapper around Bing, in conjunction with their own crawlers & knowledge engine. Claim to be private, but you can’t verify this yourself.
Qwant - looking at their privacy policy, they use the browsers local storage to fingerprint you “to store settings”. Take that as you will.
Startpage - owned by an advertising company. A wrapper around bing Google.
As a complimentary comment, underlying privacy concerns with search engines is that they all are SaaS, according to Stallman:
With SaaSS, the users do not have even the executable file that does their computing: it is on someone else’s server, where the users can’t see or touch it. Thus it is impossible for them to ascertain what it really does, and impossible to change it.
(Source)
Sure, FOSS is certainly better than proprietary, that would make SearX something preferable as it is FOSS despite it being SaaS as well. Though, there is one that isn’t SaaS and it’s YaCy as it’s decentralized, though it’s not for the faint of heart.
Thank you for introducing me to this.
I found links in your comment that were not hyperlinked:
I did the honors for you.
[1](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fu%2FLinkifyBot&subject=delete%20ge8q3fh&message=Click%20the%20send%20button%20to%20delete%20the%20false%20positive.) ^| [2](https://np.reddit.com/u/LinkifyBot/comments/gkkf7p) ^| ^<3
Thanks. I forgot about that.
I can see that it has progressed much. It used to be only metager.de/en and now an English version of its own. Nice. One cool thing about Metager is that it also utilizes YaCy in their searches. It’s all FOSS (source) and it also has an official Onion site:
Onesearch is a joint venture by Yahoo and Verizon built on top of Bing search results. I’m skeptical of any of their privacy claims to say the least.
wow this is nice, surprised didn’t come across this yet
YaCy is a cool concept. But it seems an impossible task to index the whole of the internet on your own… It would be cool if it worked p2p somehow and every search would add to the infrastructure of the whole network somehow.
Oh, I didn’t know about YaCy. I will check it out!
Don’t do personal stuff on work machines or networks.
Metager is in a class by itself. It was founded by some pretty radical privacy activists who believe in the freedom of knowledge. Free from state control. Searching to find that knowledge (information) is at the very core of this freedom. SUMA is an organization second to none in their commitment to privacy and search.
Has someone managed to force firecos klar ( focus ) to add it as a search engine. Mine does, but the choice remains only google, ddg, amazon or wiki. When i try to add it again i see that its already something with exact name but cannot see it