You've tried DuckDuckGo and Brave Search, now get serious with SearXNG - Neowin

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Over the last decade, it has become quite trendy to dump Google Search in favor of privacy-preserving alternatives such as DuckDuckGo, Startpage, and Brave Search. These search engines have done a very good job at highlighting dodgy practices by Google, such as adjusting search results based on what it thinks you’ll like (filter bubble) and stalking you around the web to advertise to you.

While these search engines are good starting points when compared to non-private services like Google, there are still quite a few issues with them. For example, both DuckDuckGo and Brave Search require running non-free JavaScript in your web browser, which is comparable to running proprietary software on your computer, meaning you can be sure about what it’s actually doing in the background.

Another issue is that these search engines are hosted on the respective companies’ servers, and you are using a service that you don’t control. Finally, DuckDuckGo, while offering privacy features, relies heavily on Microsoft’s infrastructure for its results and, in the past, has permitted Microsoft tracking scripts.

If you are looking for a more private search solution than DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, and Startpage, then I recommend taking a look at SearXNG. It is a privacy-respecting metasearch engine that can be used via different public instances, which is useful for mobile users, or you can install it on your computer or server and run it locally with maximum control.

Unlike Google, Bing, or Brave Search, which crawl the web and have their own search indexes, SearXNG is a metasearch engine, meaning it taps other search engines, stripping your identifying data, such as IP address, user agent, and cookies, in the process. Your search query is sent to the other search engines you enable before aggregating the results.

SearXNG has deployment flexibility. If you are a casual user or a mobile user and don’t want to run SearXNG locally, you can use a public instance that is hosted by someone else. The main problem with this is that you are putting trust in the maintainer of the instance regarding stuff like logs that they may keep; good hosts should have a privacy policy explaining their policies.

If you are trying to use SearXNG, you can also install the software on your device and then head to 127.0.0.1:8080 in your browser and search from there. While you don’t have to worry about a third-party admin like the public instances, search engines could ultimately block your IP address if they frown on you pulling in their search results locally. If you want to run it locally, it’s a good idea to use proxies or VPNs to hide your actual IP. You don’t have to worry about this with a public instance, as search engines never see your IP address.

The main privacy benefit of using SearXNG is that it isolates your identity from the underlying engines that it’s capable of searching, such as Google and Bing. These search engines will only see requests coming from a generic server, so they can’t profile you and create a bubble filter that influences what results you see. This also ensures that your search engine doesn’t turn into an echo chamber that prevents you from reading alternative points of view.

As a free software project, you are allowed to inspect SearXNG to make sure there are no negative features bundled inside. This sets it apart from the privacy search engines mentioned earlier because you can’t check their source code.

As a meta search engine, you are not restricted to getting results from one source. Due to the fact that it scrapes content from other websites, your SearXNG instance will periodically get blocked from different providers, so it’s good to select a range of sources as a backup. While enabling all of the services will give you great results, this can make searching slower. I am personally happy with slower searches for the best results, but you can always check which providers are slowing down your search from the search results page and disable them to speed things up.

If you want decent results quickly, enable the main search providers such as Google, Brave, DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Bing, and Yahoo. This way, you get wide coverage without the latency. On the Engines tab in Preferences, do note that there are different tabs, such as General, Images, and Videos, with their own providers that can be toggled and are not covered by "Enable all" while on the General tab, so be sure to dig into each. Just a note, if you want to enable everything, press "Enable all" in one tab, then hit save at the bottom of the page, then do the next tab, and so on. If you press "Enable all", then do that in each tab, and then save, nothing will stick.

When I had just some of the search engines enabled, I searched “define nefarious” and...