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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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Kagi is the best search engine on the web right now.
They charge for it because they need to get money some other way then selling your data. But it's well worth it.
We have to stop expecting things to be free. They can't be free if you want privacy and quality and no ads.
I've seen it mentioned and you're quite right about expecting to get quality, privacy, and free. It's always a pick two.
But can you explain why Kagi is so good?
Also a Kagi user here. First thing you'll notice compared to other search engines is no ads at the top.
Comparing between multiple search engines, Kagi consistently delivers relevant results for world wide content, but also for more local searches.
You can further refine your search by up/down ranking sites for yourself or even create customized lenses that search specific (types of) sites if you know where you might find the answer. There are multiple predefined lenses, for example searching only .edu domains, forums or programming language websites.
I could but you should just try it and see what you think. You can search 100 times for free to check it out.
If you find what you are looking for and even getting new good results you never saw on Google, that's a very good rating. :)
kagi is great, ddg is also improving
The DDG problems where with their app because it had some Microsoft tracker in, nothing with the search engine.
I'm pretty sure DDG said they were censoring certain results that were misinformation related to Covid stuff.
Some people flipped out because ddg said they were removing results for what they deemed as conspiracy theories about Covid, at least that's what I heard.
Yeah but... That was like 10 very loud idiots. There was a time where "news sites" spammed covid misinformation and they where right to block it.
Very true. Yeah I'm not saying I disagre with their choice, I just couldn't remember akk the exact details of the drama.
Some folks want zero "tampering" with search results. But honestly, a y search engine by definition is already curating the results before they ever get to the end user. The algos and crawler indexing they do, on top of all the ranking choices for relevance and organization is all effecting what comes back from a search.
Yeah, unfiltered results would include .onion websites...
Plus just a million random junk results that wouldn't be helpful.
Yeah that as well
The Microsoft trackers issue is bad and they eventually had to address it due to the backlash, but that's not the only issue.
They also began explicitly censoring search results and information. Regardless of any given persons stance on any particular issue, things like censoring or downranking particular results or labeling content mis, dis or mal information means an entity like DDG is acting as an arbiter of truth and limiting the information users have access to rather than acting as a tool for users to utilize in searching for info and presenting any and all viewpoints, allowing the user to make up their own mind.
https://reclaimthenet.org/duckduckgo-down-ranking-russian-disinformation
DDG does not index .onion websites, is it censorship?
And downranking search engine optimized Covid and Russia desinformation is part of being a useful search engine. If you search for "Ukraine" and the first 20 results are obviously Kremlin propaganda, your search engine is trash and nobody will use it because the results are unreliable at best.
The tracker issue had and has nothing to do with the search engine, just with the app. Yes that wasn't a good thing but rather insignificant.
I'll decide what is misinformation or propaganda for myself. If someone else is limiting what information you can and cannot have or determining what is objectively true for you before you even have exposure to other ideas, everything you "know" is unreliable at best.
Sounds like the biggest you problem imaginable... The search just downranks the shit, you can still find it.
What's the purpose of searching, if not finding?
Then why make finding harder?
Thats literally my point .
Man that website was so useful, thank you for linking it
What are the controversies with DuckDuckGo? I’ve never heard of anything.
Their browser is sharing data with MS, since they're using their services instead of Google. They've been upfront about it and explained there is no way around it.
As long as you just use their search engine, you're fine.
In addition to the Microsoft trackers, I referenced this as well in another reply in this topic:
https://reclaimthenet.org/duckduckgo-down-ranking-russian-disinformation
There are plenty of other sources that also reported on this.
You can use Farside with a Whoogle instance.
That way you don't have to rely on a single instance.
TIL about farside, it looks very useful
How can I set this up on cromite?
I've added farside.link searx instance "main link" (https://farside.link/searx) to "homepage" but it gives me the same searx instance everytime
Between the ones I tried startpage, DDG, and Brave the 1st one gives me the best results, all of them are privacy respecting
Maybe you should give Qwant a try
Qwant just shows Bing results, like most alternative search engines.
Startpage.com Other i use are listed on privacytools.io
I selfhost SearXNG and route it's traffic through a VPN. I rarely get blocked by search engines, and when I do I just change the VPN server. You lose the benefit of your data being intermixed with everyone elses on a shared instance, but you still get the other privacy improvements from SearXNG
Do you have the ability to run your own Whoogle instance?
Mullvad Leta is a good option but it's not convenient because you need to be connected to their VPN
Search (pun) for a SearxNG (read as searching) instance.
It's an open source meta search engine. You can make it even more private if you selfhost it.
OP said they want to stop using SearxNG.
Also, selfhosting it makesist less privacy friendly, if you are hosting it only for yourself, as the search engines your instance is contacting can easily determine that all those searches are coming from a same IP. Sp, even if it is preventing the telemetry collection, a detailed profile can be made on the person hosting it. Butiff multiple people are using it, profiling becomes difficult. Same is the case with using self-hosted VPNs. They are good against censorship and for some other things, but not for privacy.
Oh, thank you for correcting me! It's right there and I didn't see it. My bad.
You raise good points. I confess I hadn't thought about it like that. So, not only you corrected me, you also enlightened me. I'm today's lucky 10000!
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