3w ago

Your guide to finding a new Search Engine service and supporting European companies!

76 comments

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.
  
  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?
  
  What about on iOS where it's all forced WebKit?
- 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.
- Also reminder that StartPage is majority-owned by American ad company Sytem1

stop promoting brave. oh my god it's 2025 how good is their propaganda... they were never cool.

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…

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.

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
- looks really good, something to rewrite in Rust some day!

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)

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

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.

Pretty weak chart to not even include "I care most about porn search"

I've been happy with DDG for so long. Uuugh.
- Honestly I shopped around a lot and tried various services for 7 days each. In the end I came back to DDG because it's the most useful engine to me. It delivers results I look for and doesn't get in the way.
  As a result I'm not quite satisfied, but it will have to do for now.
- It's a marathon not a sprint. DDG is a big improvement, keep using it till you find something better that works for you

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”.
- 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 changed to Ecosia when I last saw this chart. It's working really well and is my main search engine across all my devices now.
But now I'm considering moving to Mojeek if that's better for privacy.
- Ecosia is based in the EU and it's working together with Qwant to build an European index. But Ecosia's mission is planting trees, and in order to do that they need revenue, which comes from targeted advertising.
  
  @Scrollone @cRaziman But I think it’s contextual advertising. If you search for “lawnmower” you get lawnmower ads.
- Ecosia is a better balance between experience and independence. Mojeek sadly will be a hit in terms of quality of results.
  
  I switched from duckduckgo to ecosia based off your graphic :)

I recommend Ecosia!

Can't wait to get some news about Qwant and Ecosia new index

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.

Thanks. This I nice little guide, easy to suss and helps me figure my priorities.

There are more open source engines:
Stract
Mwmbl
- Stract is impressive I don't know what more people don't know about it

https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/

Does YaCy & Wiby count too ?

Is there something like Weebly from Europe?
- Sadly I don't have that answer on the top of my head. Maybe ask in !PurchaseWithPurpose@lemmy.world to whether others might be able to help.

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?

This is a bit like Trumps tariffs, we need to cut everything off but there is no real alternative services. According this infograph, Startpage should be politically correct choice..
- Qwant is the closest to being independent and Non-US.... I was recently told about StartPage being bought out by System1 (A US company)

How about just NOT supporting companies? Having an European company control what gets shown to you is not much of an improvement over having an American one do it...
There are decentralized search engines like SearXNG
- The problem with that philosophy is that SearXNG is an aggregator, so if everyone moved to them... who would be paying for the engines that it aggregates?
  I agree that no one should ever support a company. But rather establish a set of principles that you want the companies you use to follow, and show no loyalty if they break this.
  It is actually the philosophy of !PurchaseWithPurpose@lemmy.world.
- SearXNG is in the picture and it's one of the 3 recommended.
  
  Yeah I just find the title very weird, to me it makes more sense to choose a search engine because it respects your privacy than to "support European companies"
  I hadn't read the "Need help choosing?" part of the picture, so still oupsie on my part 😅 I wish it mentioned that it's decentralized... but considering it's aimed at people using Google, I guess that'd be like trying to convert people from twitter/reddit to mastodon/lemmy by geeking out about decentralization and ActivityPub. No one cares, aside from the people who are already using it 😅

Anyone noticed google brought back forum seaching again? I left google search way back just because that feature went away.
Either way I can't stand the AI answers I can't turn off.

where is duckduckgo on this chart?
- In the PrivateSearch section, but greyed out as they are not an EU based company.

76 comments