Hi everyone,
I’m choosing a default search engine and I’m torn between DuckDuckGo and Brave Search. What matters most to me:
Privacy: what’s actually logged, and can the claims be trusted? Independence from Big Tech: DDG partly relies on Bing, while Brave has its own index. Result quality: relevance for daily, technical and niche queries. Trust: track record, controversies, business model.
Which one do you use daily, and why? Have you noticed a real quality difference? Thanks!
I stopped using DDG because it kept steering me to articles that were rehosted with paywalls by MSN instead of the actual source of the content.
I use Brave mostly, because they at least pretend to be private, and I actually get some decent results.
Unsurprisingly the best results come from Kagi, the paid service, primarily because they let you cater the results to your preferences. You can blacklist certain sites, prefer others, and even search the “small web” for blogs and such from smaller creators, and the Fediverse at large.
Why pay for some company to watch over you and your searchs? If you want real private searching it comes down to searXNG!
Agreed, hosting is probably the most private web search we have. Only your IP address is still sent to the actual search engines searXNG calls. Using a VPN would solve this last bit too.
An extreme alternative would also be Tor.
SearXNG is not absolute privacy either. They don’t each have their own index.
No one pays “for some company to watch over you”. The reason why you pay I already gave: because it’s better at what it does.
SearXNG is private iff you use someone else’s instance
Me, I like self hosting things… So it’s actually less private. Multiple search engines get each of my queries lol