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.
Good find… I’ll add it.
Can you clarify what you mean? The note about Tor-hostile results is on the row labeled “has onion site”. Generally, only Tor users visit onion sites. So if you give a Tor user links that they cannot interact with (e.g. b/c they’ll get a 403 access denied error or broken CAPTCHA), the content is already censored by the webmaster. Polluting the search results with such broken/unusable links actually suppresses links that would be more useful by pushing them down.
Note as well the Searxes doesn’t censor CloudFlare links. I’m not sure if that’s your concern. Search engines with a linear output have to decide on the sequence to list links. The topmost links are the first seen by the user, so it’s important to rank the sites by usefulness. You cannot add a link to the top of the page without pushing another link off the screen. CloudFlare links are poorest quality of results with lower usability because of blockades, CAPTCHAs, and other shenanigans. They don’t get censored by Searxes but they do get low positions to ensure that the more useful links appear first. That’s not censorship; it’s simply smart ranking.
Regarding privacy abuse, I can only guess that you are talking about the row “feeds other privacy abusers”. That means the search engine benefits a privacy abuser, so I see no connection to censorship in that context. E.g. DDG partners with Yahoo to deliver ads to users. That generates ad revenue for Yahoo. Yahoo has a long history of privacy abuse and DDG is helping a corporation that should be boycotted.
Note as well this is the c/privacy community, so the focus here is not censorship but rather privacy.
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