In terms of privacy, this is how the Searxes (meta of meta searches) compares to DDG, Startpage, and Mojeek:
| privacy factor | DDG | Startpage | Mojeek | Searxes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| caught violating privacy policy | yes | no | no | no |
| bad track record (history of privacy abuse) | yes (CEO founded Names DB) | owned by targetted ad agency | no | |
| feeds other privacy abusers | yes (Verizon-Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, CloudFlare) | yes (Google, CloudFlare) | no | no |
| privacy-hostile sites in search results | yes | yes | yes (but appears less frequent than ddg) | no (CloudFlare sites filtered out) |
| server code is open source | no | no | no | yes |
| has an onion site | yes (but Tor-hostile results still given) | no | no | yes |
| gives users a proxy or cache | no | yes (using Anonymous View feature) | no | yes (via the favicons) |
Superficially Metager is privacy respecting and there’s even an .onion host for it. So I’ll have to add it to the table in the future.
For the moment, I’ll say that Metager shares the following with advertisers:
- first 2 blocks of your IP address
- user-agent string
- your search query They say it’s for non-personalised advertizing.
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