stop promoting brave. oh my god it’s 2025 how good is their propaganda… they were never cool.
Not a search engine, but last week I learned of the European Open Websearch project, which builds a new free and open search index. It should already be ready to try out. Hopefully we will see some search engines implementing this soon.
I really wish Kagi wasn’t American. Kagi is such a good product, and I’d be willing to pay for it, but in no universe am I willing to pump more money into silicon valley.
I really wish Qwant would add the ability for me to Seach “1 eur to usd” and just get the results.
Along with “tsla” and “23 *3” and just get results.
Whats the last one?
Daily reminder that
- Brave’s CEO donates to homophobic organizations and
- Brave is connected to the BAT pay-to-surf scam
Don’t use Brave.
- Brave is based on Chromium and therefore helps contribute to Google having hegemony over web standards.
Always use a Firefox-based browser, even if you think Mozilla sucks.
What about on iOS where it’s all forced WebKit?
Ideally don’t use iOS it’s a walled garden, you don’t really control your device
At least until Ladybird is ready. I hope they are not under too much pressure to rush things so we get a truly independent web browser.
What about Vanadium?
If it relies on Chromium as a base in any way, it is still beholden to Google’s design decisions.
Also reminder that StartPage is majority-owned by American ad company Sytem1
Yup! It is noted in the highlighted text in red. I’ve had several people respond that they didn’t know about it, and would be making the switch away :)
Never had a good feeling about that one.
It’s a shitty “secure” browser to begin with imho
I’m waiting for Servo (I know it’s not a browser) & LadyBird.
I recommend Ecosia!
I wish Kagi was not American. I was pretty happy with it until America became a thread
Me too. Kagi is the best of them all, including Google.
The only downside? It’s an American company.
Another downside is that is costs $5 a month to use…
I’m okay with forsaking one avocado toast a month for a search engine that actually works, but if I don’t feel good about where my money goes then I’m signficantly less willing.
I like spending money on the things I use. The status of paying customer is an enviable position (minus the paying part).
How terrible that you have to pay for a product you use
No one wanting to pay for anything is what got us into this mess in the first place
I was thinking about the aspect of privacy. Not only do you need a user, you also have to give them your payment details.
And don’t get me started on their “300 searches a month”-bullshit. If I pay for 300 searches, I want my 300 searches. Regardless of how long it takes me to use it.
You can sign up to Kagi and pay anonymously, they state how to do it in their FAQ’s.
I was thinking about the aspect of privacy. Not only do you need a user, you also have to give them your payment details.
Kagi has established Privacy Pass which perfectly meets the need of balancing paid search with privacy. If you have a better fix I’m sure they’d love to hear about it on their feedback forum.
And don’t get me started on their “300 searches a month”-bullshit. If I pay for 300 searches, I want my 300 searches. Regardless of how long it takes me to use it.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As a someone who averages >1000 searches/month, I burned through the 300/month tier pretty quickly. They’re kind enough to credit you if you don’t use their service in a given month, which is already uncommon in the subscription business model.
They’re basically all compromised in one way or another. 😞
For Search, it is about finding the least bad option and hope that they will become more independent. Mojeek (fully independent but poor quality) or Qwant (building own index, but dependent on Bing)
Stract is impressive I don’t know what more people don’t know about it
Worth noting about Startpage: they’re part of System1, an American advertising/marketing company. Sytem1 claims that privacy is one of the biggest focuses though. Make of that what you will.
For now I’ll stick with SearXNG, it’s among the first things I get up and running when I distro hop, but I’m glad there are other non-US options to try.
yeah I wish decentralized search engines were more common
Very strange to put Kagi as “less private” when it’s the only non-self-hosted option that allows for completely private searches with their Privacy Pass tokens. You can access them with Tor, pay with crypto (not really that private though), and sign up with a fake email. https://kagi.com/privacy#anonymity
It isn’t marked as less private. It is grayed out because it is not based in Europe. I personally use them as I find them the best option with what is out there.
The text at the bottom says “kagi doesn’t collect any identifying data, but does require an account, so it is considered less private than the alternatives”.
I think that’s Walnut’s nod to the fact that PrivacyGuides still hasn’t wrapped their head around the concept of paid search.
I haven’t seen any legitimate evidence that Kagi’s Privacy Pass is any less private than any other search option on the market, but long ago PG defined private search as “not requiring an account” and are completely locked up on that concept.
Even though just about every VPN on the planet (and all of their recommended ones) require accounts, as do most of the other services they recommend. The world is just so used to “free” search (which just sells your data or your time) that they don’t know what to do with a new business model.
With fingerprinting and even just IP tracking, I think the question is more whether they can be trusted to not track you (i.e. whether it makes business sense).
Bitcoin isn’t private at all. It’s a very transparent cryptocurrency.
I didn’t say bitcoin and I called out not really private in my comment.
I’m just adding extra info to your comment. They take payment in Bitcoin, but crypto like Monero is private, which they don’t take.
Oh ok
Yacy. Self hosted p2p ( or local only ) search engine. Crawl the Web yourself.
What kind of storage space does it take up, and how good are the results?
Of course, it depends on how you set the crawler, i.e. how deep because of subdomains and how far links to other domains etc. are.
I crawl 71 pages: My index is currently 4,576,319 documents ( i crawled sites like github too )and occupies just under 14GB
The results depend on several factors. For example, whether you only use local or p2p. But then it also has a number of settings and you can also explicitly control what is responsible for the results down to the smallest detail. But I have to be honest and say that I haven’t dealt with this at all (especially since it’s a bit complex in some cases) because I want to expand my list of pages to crawl myself first and I only use it locally. I still regularly use duckduckgo to search. However, if you take the time for it you will get what you want in terms of quality of results.
Ah well, depending on how you set up the crawler, it consumes system resources accordingly. However, you can set and limit the utilization of RAM and storage space. The same goes for network utilization, which is pretty important because otherwise no other connections would be possible besides crawling xD
This is exciting, TBH.
I’m going to try it out! Storage space be damned 😂
looks really good, something to rewrite in Rust some day!
Pretty weak chart to not even include “I care most about porn search”
