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recommended search engine? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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I've seen a lot of discourse over which browsers we use and I myself have made the switch from brave to firefox. I still use brave as my search engine though, so... which do yall recommend? Is brave's engine necessarily bad to use? I personally like its ui/theme.

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[–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

SearXNG. It'll search all the other engines for you, in a privacy preserving way.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Caveat that it is only privacy preserving if you trust whoever is hosting it.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    The solution to that is to host it yourself. A VPS with 2GB RAM would be would be more than sufficient for SearxNG, and you can often find those for around $15/year (see GreenCloudVPS budget KVM line, RackNerd sales, other hosts on LowEndTalk). Or, you could run it on a Raspberry Pi, especially now that Raspberry Pis are more accessible and not out of stock everywhere.

    Be careful though. Self hosting is addictive. You start with one service on a low-end VPS or Raspberry Pi, then you outgrow the server, expand, and eventually end up in !selfhosted@lemmy.world with a full-size server rack in your house.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I suppose I don't fully understand the model, but if you host it yourself, then wouldn't that be significantly worse for privacy because you're essentially forwarding your searches to multiple search engines instead of one?

    Again, maybe I'm missing something, but SearXNG just seems like a bunch of privacy memes mashed together without actually considering the threat model involved very deeply. Ultimately all of your data needs to be forwarded to a search provider in the end, the only way you are gaining any benefit would be if you had a sufficient pool of other users to obfuscate who is querying what, with a host who you are able to trust with your data.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

    In terms of privacy, most people mean things like tracking cookies, where Google can track you across all your devices. With something like SearXNG, requests still go to Google, etc. but they don't know who you are. There aren't any tracking cookies for them to know who you are, and if you host it on a VPS, the IP the search comes from isn't yours so there's no way to correlate anything by IP address.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    That's not how cookies work, cookies are stored on, and controlled by, your client. Unless your client is sharing the cookie information across devices, google wouldn't be able to track you across devices using cookies. Routing all of your searches to one machine allows google to build a richer search profile against you, rather than one scattered across multiple different IPs, device fingerprints, etc.

    I assume you mean across the web? That too is more of a different issue, as it is unrelated to the use of google search itself, rather it is due to the existence of tracking services embedded into the websites you visit.

    At the end of the day, your VPS is still having a search profile build against it, in a similar manner to just using your personal device. The main difference is that you are paying to have a specialized computer that serves as a single purpose google searching device. Perhaps it is more challenging for them to link that device directly to you specifically, but I'd honestly bet that it is achievable.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

    That's not how cookies work, cookies are stored on, and controlled by, your client. Unless your client is sharing the cookie information across devices, google wouldn't be able to track you across devices using cookies.

    Sorry, I didn't mean to imply the same cookie is shared between clients. Google place cookies when you log in, and they know all the cookies associated with your account. You could always do searches when you're logged out, across all your devices, which would prevent them from tracking you cross-device. It's pretty rare for people to not be logged into a Google service though, especially on mobile.

    Routing all of your searches to one machine allows google to build a richer search profile against you, rather than one scattered across multiple different IPs, device fingerprints, etc.

    At the end of the day, your VPS is still having a search profile build against it, in a similar manner to just using your personal device.

    You can get a bunch of people to use it though (friends and family). I also doubt they build profiles just based on IP, since it's not uncommon to share IPs given the IPv4 shortage. There's also CGNAT where hundreds of thousands of people share a sml number of public IPs.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It’s pretty rare for people to not be logged into a Google service though, especially on mobile.

    If that is the case then this conversation is somewhat moot isn't it? But I also don't really think it is all that rare for iOS users.

    You can get a bunch of people to use it though (friends and family).

    That's a good point, definitely see a benefit then.

    I also doubt they build profiles just based on IP, since it’s not uncommon to share IPs given the IPv4 shortage. There’s also CGNAT where hundreds of thousands of people share a sml number of public IPs.

    Certainly, and because of that you don't really need a proxy.

    There are definitely some benefits to such a setup, I just don't think it really is superior to a search provider that is built around not logging and selling your searches. At least not to the degree it gets recommended in these types of posts.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    An idea I forgot to mention is that you can use a VPN on your self-hosted SearxNG server so that all searches go over the VPN. That'll definitely anonymize them. If you use Docker, there's ways to route particular containers through a VPN container which is perfect for this use case (you can make it so just SearxNG goes over the VPN while everything else goes directly to the internet).

    There are definitely some benefits to such a setup, I just don't think it really is superior to a search provider that is built around not logging and selling your searches.

    I agree with this, but does such a provider exist? Kagi may be the only one that truly does it. DuckDuckGo might do it too I guess.

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