Technology
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
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A mix of Qwant, Ecosia, and Startpage.
startpage
Surprising no one has said Metager yet, very privacy focused search engine, no hassle.
I use one of the searxng instances or startpage.com
I'm using Startpage.com (can set the location - I also have the problem that I use a VPN and keep getting not the language I want. IDK how to make it stick though), and Kagi paid for a bit now.
Google chrome for ordinary search. For more challenging qwant, searX.
I use MullvadVPN and recently started using Mullvads leta search service. It is basically a Front End for Googles Search APi. The result of an external audit was released recently.
The results arengood so far, but I'm not sure if I'll be using it long term.
I just run a searxng instance for myself. Fetches from multiple sources.
I've heard good things about kagi, but it does require paying for (though you can try out a free tier to see if it'll work for you)
Brave search but am looking for something else now that image search has been removed.
DDG. On a related note, it seems like Google doesn't know me at all, 'cause they always give me wiki results in my local language over the english wiki, although I exclusively click the google search result for English Wikipedia further down...
I use DDG on desktop and Google on mobile. Unfortunately Google still has some conveniences that I can't give up just yet.
yandex for sailing the piraseas, SearNX instance for everything else.
DuckDuckGo is great, I also switched to Brave Search a couple months ago. The results aren't as good, but I like how it's independently indexed.
I use Ecosia. Supposedly I've done enough searches for 241 trees to be planted, and I've yet to see anything that suggests they dont follow through with the promise to fund the planting of trees (although I've not actively looked). I think it's backed by bing so the results are a bit iffy sometimes, but I use the equivalent of ddg bangs to search Google if I need
Hosting my own Whoogle and LibreX, they work decently well for my purpose.
I've been exclusively using DuckDuckGo until recent controversies, then switched to Metager. It is a privacy-oriented, opensource metasearch engine and they aren't relying on bing/google search results like almost every other search engine.
Results are really good and consistently relevant. But it has some minor annoyances, and recently metager started locking more and more features behind a paywall. I'll keep using it if I won't find better alternative.
Perplexity. It saves me a lot of time.
I use my own instance of SearXNG, its private, and has good settings. It is a few milliseconds slow with some searches taking 1 second.