Are there any privacy search engines better than Startpage?
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Hello everyone.
Could you please tell me which privacy search engines are better than Startpage?
I’ve looked at about 5–10 different options, and Startpage turned out to be the best in terms of search results, its minimalist design, and the absence of Google trackers and other junk.
1. DuckDuckGo – poor search results (fourth place in my ranking)
2. Mojeek – I’d put this in second place after Startpage
3. Qwant – causes problems for the user with captchas, etc.
4. Swisscows – asks for payment, etc.
5. searX – of the options available here https://searx.space/, 90% of them don’t work properly.
6. Peekier – requires registration with unethical accounts
7. MetaGer – instead of searching straight away, you have to spend time creating something incomprehensible for no apparent reason… very inconvenient and time-consuming.
8. Ecosia – I’d put it in third place
Since discussions here focus on Free Software, I would consider the metasearch engine SearXNG (not searx[1]). It is AGPL-licensed. Many are running instances; some of them are on the website you posted but not all. I found a couple of instances that works for me and use one of them as my default search engine. It is true that finding an instance that works for you takes a bit of work. Also, not all instances have the same configuration --- so not the same results. For example I sometimes switch to an instance that better caters queries in the French language.
DDG, Startpage, Mojeek, Qwant, Swisscows, Peekier and Ecosia are proprietary.
Metager's organisation published code on a repository. I can see it is MIT Licensed. But I don't know if that is the whole source code *and* whether the search engine can be self-hosted --- which is the ultimate test (at least for me) to check whether I can rely on a software. Signal Messenger, for example, is freely licensed but can't be self-hosted so I don't use it.
There are other options also :
- https://trisquel.info/en/forum/searx-metasearch-engine#comment-69375
[1] no longer maintained; source: searx's repo.
I am a translator!
I don't know if that is the whole source code
This is the same for any server, you have to trust that it does what it says it does. One way is by running it yourself, another way is that it is run by people you know and trust, directly or indirectly.
whether the search engine can be self-hosted
The search engine can't do anything without data. SearXNG relies on making queries to Google, DDG and others. For translations, you can self-host libretranslate and download the language model data, then you can run it in on your computer and translate anything without making any query to a server. This is entirely private but I am not sure how to study and modify the language model data.
In any case, web pages change at a much faster pace than human languages, so if there would be some database available, you would need to refresh it periodically. Also, I am not sure you can easily study and modify such a database.
Considering only privacy, using TOR might be a reasonable option. I sometimes use torbrowser installed from guix on trisquel. By the way, I just installed libretranslate from guix on trisquel (you need to install nss-certs from guix too, and set environment variables as indicated in the guix manual), it works fine.
Thank you very much for your reply.
Of course, I realise we’re talking about free software, but there’s a simple logic to it)) If the Abrowser browser https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/abrowser-help has DuckDuckGo set as its default search engine, and it works (searches) poorly, why use it?
Yes, StartPage isn’t the best option in terms of freedom and everything else, but it works better than any other in terms of search – that’s simply a fact.
We’re not talking about the licence or anything else, but specifically how the search engine works.
If there’s a search engine of the same quality with a free licence, etc.
I just use DDG for the most part, have been for many years, I find the search results to be excellent. Not sure what your complaint about DDG is based on, perhaps there are regional differences if you are searching from a different country or in a different language?
Startpage is ok, I use it once every couple of months if I'm trying to find something that DDG is unable to find. I use Brave search as my main secondary search engine these days, I think it does a good job of showing different results, different priority of results, and using different algorithms from DDG, so I get a better cross section of search results between DDG and Brave.
SearXNG instances are good, I do use them occasionally, but I end up just setting the SearXNG preferences to use DDG and Brave since those are the results I'm used to. So I don't gain much by going through SearXNG to get the same results, and SearXNG has trouble displaying some results.
For non-js searching, such as when I use the links2 browser from the terminal, I find that Mojeek works the best for me.
Thank you for yours replies.
Andy, your reply is close to what I was writing about and asking.
You say that DDG searches well; you’re right—you can change the language and this search engine will return different results; that’s true.
But Startpage, as it turns out, works more universally and accurately, regardless of whether you change the language or not.
I tested this myself using a word and a phrase that relates to two languages (in English).
As for SearxNG, yes, you can run it locally on your computer or on a server to make it more private; I agree that’s the best option.
I tried it and, as you said, it wasn’t always accurate.
Here are some examples that struck me as quite good:
https://priv.au
https://search.disroot.org/
There are also search engines like SearxNG, but they don’t work very well; here’s an example
libreY => https://librex.nohost.network/search.php?q=trisquel&p=0&t=0
or
whoogle => https://search.sethforprivacy.com/
Swisscows used to be good, I originally just liked the name as i find it funny :)
A couple of years ago, they kept having site issues and I got fed up with them and moved over to Startpage. I've stuck with them for quite a while now simply because it works for me and the results are pretty good.
oh and they don't seem to bother me with "use our VPN" and push other services. :)
I think the ones you've listed really are the only ones around. Unless you wanted to host SearXNG yourself.