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
  • Herowyn@kbin.social
    131·
    1 year ago

    Using qwant because it’s developed and hosted in France. Better than supporting a US company as a European.

    • tarlitz@feddit.nlEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I started using qwant last year for the same reason and I haven’t looked back. Search results are excellent. I sometimes switch to Startpage as a proxy for google.