It looks like Duck Duck Go is down at the moment. What is your second choice for privacy respecting search?

I recommend startpage.com over duckduckgo. It provides at least the same privacy as DDG while having generally better results because it uses google's results instead of bing's.

Edit: The ultimate search engine though, as mentioned by macattack, is SearxNG because it combines privacy with every other search engine and even allows you to mix and match your result sources.

With all the SEO garbage, are G**gle results still relevant? I haven’t used it in years for anything serious.
Start page was purchased by an ad company a while ago
Startpage is owned by a advertising company and closed source. wouldnt really recommend it

My first choice is actually Kagi these days. I pay for my search provider to have some peace of mind that my search provider isn't selling me.

I got it not too long ago, and I love it. The results are good, and the features are what i wish all search engines had. Just not looking forward to when they sell to venture capatilists down the line, and everything becomes terrible.
In the meantime, everyone should check out their Small Web intiative. Gives you a random blog or small website. There's some really good articles I would have never read otherwise.
- It’s like stumbleupon!
- I have also discovered very interesting blogs or site that I have then added to my RSS feed. They also offer a lens to only look within the small web, which they index themselves I think.
- Just not looking forward to when they sell to venture capatilists down the line, and everything becomes terrible.
  Judging by their ethos so far, I don't think that's a goal. I'd almost say it's a non-goal.
I used to pay for kagi, but their CEO have some opinions that I absolutely hate about how to handle some issues, and this was a deal breaker for me. Nowadays I'm using searxng
- What opinions can I ask? first time I've heard this
does kagi spit out location-relevant information? that's something I've really missed on startpage, I like being able to just google "chinese food" and have the restaurants near me spit back out, and if a privacy-centered search engine can return a result comparable to something like google there that'd make me real happy
- Nope. For that I use the bang shortcut feature to send it to Google.
  One nice thing about that, is that you can use g as a bang, instead of !g. It’s a little thing but easier to type on mobile.
- There is a map search mode that does surface location aware results, after explicitly getting your permission to get your location.
- They use approximate network location for such requests, yes.
  "chinese food" didn't trigger it for me which is understandable since it's a generic term, not a request to show chinese food restaurants near you but "chinese food near me" does show restaurants in my approximate vicinity as expected aswell as localised search results for tripadvisor.
  In their privacy policy they claim that that's explicitly the only time they use data that could be considered sensitive in a search request.

I self-host searXNG, but you can use one of the public instances as well. My understanding is that it is more secure because you're search results are commingled with whoever else uses the instance, but you also can use something like libredirect to further distribute your search results across various instances for further security

How exactly do you self host your own searxng instance? Also, based on what you said, wouldn't having your own instance make you stand out more?
- Having your own instance can be bad for privacy, as all your searches come from your IP (hosted at home) or the same IP (hosted on a server). They might not be traced to you personally, but you might still get personalized results or your search may still be tracked, depending on how they track you.
  That's circumvented when using it with some or better many other people. But then, you need to trust the admin of that instance.
  Self-hosted is easy if you know a bit about servers. You need a domain pointing to a server. If it's the only thing hosted on that server and you have set up docker on it, you can just follow their instructions here to get it running in less than 5 minutes (assuming you run the default config and don't customize all of the settings for a while): https://github.com/searxng/searxng-docker?tab=readme-ov-file#how-to-use-it
- Someone already gave an extensive comment about how to set things up so I will skip that part.
  Good observation re: self hosting potentially reducing privacy. The way that I keep my privacy during self-hosting is to completely avoid search engines that track my IP address, and then, ideally, although the remaining search engines are less efficient than the likes of Google or Bing, the fact that the results are aggregated hopefully increase the efficiency of the results.
  For my default searches, it uses mwmbl, mojeek & qwant

I use startpage.

Also a bit unrelated, but I just found that Gigablast shut down 10 months ago. And also this (a bit earlier) comment from the author: (source)

Yeah, Google forced my search engine basically out of business. I had ixquick.com as a big client at one time; I was providing them with search results from my custom web search engine. Then their CEO called me one day and told me he was cancelling, even though he'd been a client for over 10 years. He said it was because of some change Google had made to their agreement. Ixquick needed Google's results and ads for their startpage.com website, and, even though my results were shown on their ixquick.com and later ixquick.eu sites, apparently Google wasn't good with that.

They were purchased by and ad company a whole back
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/di5rn3/startpage_is_now_owned_by_an_advertising_company/

I want to take this time to say DDG is getting worse in the hopes they reverse course if I say it enough times.

They are giving location based results even when location is off. They are putting us in the bubble they based their marketing around being outside of

I think mojeek is the best in privacy atm but it isn't really good as a search engine.

you can smash the "submit feedback" button on the page when you get a duff search and send it into us, it's how we improve: https://blog.mojeek.com/2024/02/major-algorithm-update.html
- Will do and i love your ethics.
- First time I've heard of Mojeek. Why should I trust it more than any other company? Is there anything particular about its economic model or governance that makes it less likely to decide to be unethical?

It doesn't appear to be down:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=test&ia=web

It could be a regional outage. Something like duckduckgo isn't going to be run from a single location so the individual experiences are going to vary.

duckduckgo is a US company and the CEO is the previous founder of The Names Database. i don’t know how anyone trusts it when there are so many EU alternatives

So many yet in a thread asking for names you could name one.
Like for example?
- Qwant (france-based), startpage (NL-based), searxng (bunch of host options)
  honorary mention to Stract which is currently totally useless because the results are so random, but hopefully in a few years it will be a proper alternative. they are indexing the web from scratch in order to not have to rely on existing data from other search engines (which is why the results are terrible right now lol)

MetaGer is a metasearch engine focused on protecting users' privacy. Based in Germany, and hosted as a cooperation between the German NGO 'SUMA-EV - Association for Free Access to Knowledge' and the University of Hannover, the system is built on 24 small-scale web crawlers under MetaGer's own control. In September 2013, MetaGer launched MetaGer.net, an English-language version of their search engine.

And it was initially founded in 1996!

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer

It currently supports the following languages/regions:

Dansk (Danmark)

Deutsch (Österreich/Schweiz/Deutschland)

English (Great Britain/Ireland/Malaysia/USA)

Español (España/México)

Suomalainen (Suomi)

Français (Canada/France)

Italiano (Italia)

Nederlands (Nederland)

Polski (Polska)

Svenska (Sverige)

Source: https://metager.org/lang

There is a TOR-hidden service too:

https://metager.org/tor

It is open source:

https://gitlab.metager.de/open-source/MetaGer

And other useful features, for example:

That you can hide yourself behind our proxyserver just by opening the result anonymously? Use "OPEN ANONYMOUSLY"; this also affects the following links.

Source: https://metager.org/tips

Alternatively I use some SearxNG-instances, preferably hosted in the EU:

https://searx.space/

searxng is my first, ddg second

How do you propose that?
- if youre asking for the link, i use search.bus-hit.me, more instances can be found on searx.space
- what?

I've used DDG for years but I'm worried that Microsoft has some power with them. Also that its headquarters is in the US, where there are hardly any laws that protect the user. I used Qwant for a season, based in France, but he asked me to remove the browser's ad blocker. Since then, I use a SearXNG instance, waiting to mount my own. Very happy.

Duck duck go is my 2nd lol. SearX is my first.

Why?
- Duckduckgo doesn't remove microsoft's trackers. We really need a good search engine out here, searx is the best I've found.

Qwant.com ?

This is what I use because they take your ad revenue and plant trees. Judge for yourself.

https://www.ecosia.org/privacy

Second this, it's fast and they have good privacy practices as far as I'm aware.

No one really talks about it and it's in its infancy, but I've really been enjoying Stract.com

I was cheeky and put Lemmy into the "find a website" menu and it listed off a bunch of instances.
- If you've used Kagi, it has a feature much like "lens" to raise the weight of fediverse results too
I really want to like stract but I can't get it to give me good results. I typically search for programming related things and it has difficulty pulling up relevant information regarding things like documentation and posts regarding the issue.
- That's fair, I can't say I've daily-driven it yet since I've still got my Kagi sub, but I'm thinking of defaulting it on my work computer to put it through its paces. It's done fairly well with some of my tests, but definitely seems to still be getting refined, I've noticed recent information can be difficult to find on it

I used to use DDG until they started censoring results.

I use Brave Search and Startpage. The latter is basically just a private Google proxy with some cool features and the former is fully independent, private, aesthetically appealing and has nice optional AI features.

DDG really does censor results hard. They even blocked my list of US atrocities from their search results.
DDG
Startpage / Google
- Yeah I noticed that, it's why I don't really use them. Astroturfed to shit.
  EDIT: OMG unrelated but i'm so glad you wrote https://dessalines.github.io/essays/nietzsche.html because I got into arguments on hexbear over that guy being a fascist POS and it's so vindicating to read someone backing me up on that after all the gaslighting they put me through.
- Contributing here with another sample point.
  I did not find the mentioned link on either search engines’ first page of results.
  DuckDuckGo:
  StartPage:
  I am not sure why a black bar appears when taking a full page screenshot of StartPage on Safari for iOS, but both screenshots are unedited and uploaded as-is.
- Your page isn't blocked. I found it on DDG just fine. Second page, as the other commenter pointed out.
  What else are you claiming gets censored? Would love to put it to the test myself.
  Edit: and startpage has it on page 3. Are you claiming they censored you out, as well?

SearXNG or Stract.

Stract seems like an interesting option with optics and such. What is your opinion on it?
- I only just started using it recently, so i don't have a solid opinion yet, but it seems pretty good!

Haven't seen Metager and Mojeek mentioned. Not quite sure what the consensus of them are in the privacy community.

Personally I'd like to see Stract succeed.

coming up to 20 years of no tracking, 18 of having the first privacy policy to say it: https://web.archive.org/web/20060318104627/http://www.mojeek.com/privacy.html
hopefully a good consensus 😅 at least seen very little of people saying bad
Me too and when i tried it the results were on par with google which isn't saying much nowadays though.
Here's the privacy policies for them. Metager, Mojeek, & Stract

My own searx-ng instance (routed via VPN), followed by Startpage

DDG has a weird relationship with Microsoft, I wouldn't use it. I currently pay the Pro plan for Kagi and I'm very satisfied with it.

Kagi

I like kagi. I wish it weren't a fourteen step process just to have it be the default when I search in the URL bar.

DDG still works fine for me are you sure ?

gemini search engines are not so bad for likeminded folks with likeminded topics.
ex:

12 results!
vs searching windows how to pay for windows. 0 results. srry. gemini is small.

Gemini as in google AI search? Or gemini as in the protocol?
- gemini protocol. thank u for prompting for clarification.

Worked fine all day for me.

Working for me..

If you use Mullvad VPN, you have access to their Leta search engine

I didn't know this. Do you like it?
- It's a proxy for Google, so it's the same search results that you would get on Google.

TIL there's a ton of search engines I've never heard of.

I have started using Yandex recently and so far, it is decent, but no different than DDG. The minor annoyance I have is that some links and text are in the Russian language.

Why do people like duckduckgo? Seeing how they censored results.

Why do people recommamend searchxng ? It seems to only show commercial links on my end...

I use brave search by default.

I don’t think this should be downvoted. Brave Search is one of the very few search engines that is building its own index.
DuckDuckGo and Startpage are both great, however DDG uses results from Bing and Startpage uses results from Google.
We need proper competition against these big tech giants, and Brave Search is one of the few alternatives which is attempting to provide it. Mojeek is another search engine which uses its own index.
- Start page is owned by an ad company, while back now
Not sure why are you being downvoted. Brave search is actually pretty good
- Yeah, I believe that the common consensus here on Lemmy is that Brave is ran by an A-hole and shouldn't be supported. Secondly it's hated for injecting it's own ads and tracking into things aswell as the whole crypto thing.
- The kids cancelled Brave