Internet search engines
Tips, tricks, confidentiality
August 2, 2021 — April 12, 2024
1 Search with notionally good privacy
I don’t want large search businesses to know what I am searching for.
Also, some argue, monopoly search engines make the internet boring.
Here are some links to search engines which may redress these problem.
Many of these make strong claims to protect user privacy, although few offer substantive guarantees in excess of inspecting tracking headers. Some of them repackage other searches; some run their own indices. Most of them have very unclear business models.
1.1 Mojeek
Mojeek/Mojeek Focus (Bookmark) Search Engine
Mojeek was created to provide a globally competitive and genuine alternative search engine based in the UK, and from the outset one that didn’t track its users nor simply retrieve its results from another engine (i.e. to provide real alternative results).
Mojeek’s technology has been developed entirely from scratch by Marc Smith, mostly using the C programming language, and uses no pre-existing search or web crawler technology. All technology and IP is fully owned by Mojeek Limited.
UK company.
1.2 Startpage
Startpage claims to repackage Google search results AFAIK anonymously, although I cannot see much information about why I should believe them on this. Dutch company. To use them as a searchbar search I needed to add a browser extension which is weird and tedious.
1.3 DuckDuckGo
Perennial favourite, duckduckgo is a search engine run by strident privacy advocates which is laudable I s’pose. The search is… OK. Usually not as good as Google. Every now and again it is serendipitously wonderful, but this cannot be relied upon.
1.4 Brave
Brave Search recently launched, backed by the creators of the Brave browser. TBC.
1.5 Qwant
1.6 Runnaroo
Similar? See runaroo. Promises to aggregate many other search engines and reviews sites. Business model utterly opaque.
1.7 Search encrypt
search encrypt claims to additional privacy via encryption in the Perfect Forward Secrecy mode. Presumably this is supposed to prevent them from assembling a history of my searches?
2 DIY search proxies
A.k.a. meta-searching. I suspect these imply maintenance overhead as the search companies attempt to circumvent this circumvention of their business model. Effectively, you would be participating in an arms race.
2.1 searx
The searx family is a network of metasearch engine portals with the aim of protecting the privacy of users. Searx does not share users IP addresses or search history with the search engines from which it gathers results. Tracking cookies served by the search engines are blocked etc. The flagship instance is searx.me There are many user-operated instances and it is open source. Advanced: run your own DIY search anonymiser!
2.2 mysearch
mysearch — Local search engine portal designed to anonymise search requests and display search results better.A public instance is available at search.jesuislibre.net. Dead AFAICT.
3 AI-augmented search
3.1 Perplexity
TBD
3.2 You
- You.com is an AI-heavy search thing.
Also promises a private mode:
You.com gives you the option to choose between a customized search experience through personal mode or an entirely private one through our private mode. Our private mode offers the most private search experience of any search engine. In private mode, You.com never stores your queries, preferences, or locations. That also means that localized queries (such as “best restaurants near me”) won’t work. In private mode, we only save whether the service is used at all, in order to prevent attacks and misuse of our servers.
3.3 Free/ FOSS -ish:
- nilsherzig/LLocalSearch: LLocalSearch is a completely locally running search aggregator using LLM Agents. The user can ask a question and the system will use a chain of LLMs to find the answer. The user can see the progress of the agents and the final answer. No OpenAI or Google API keys are needed.
- nashsu/FreeAskInternet: FreeAskInternet is a completely free, PRIVATE and LOCALLY running search aggregator & answer generate using MULTI LLMs, without GPU needed. The user can ask a question and the system will make a multi engine search and combine the search result to LLM and generate the answer based on search results. It’s all FREE to use.
3.4 Others
4 Decentralised search
What does the decentralized web do?
5 Suppressing spam
6 Incoming
-
Simple Search is an extension that highlights the “traditional” or “ten blue link” search results provided by the search engine, laying them over the info boxes and other content. Close the window to view the full results page. Compatible with Bing and Google search engines.
Kagi search features | Kagi Blog
- No ads
- Ability to block/boost domains
- Bangs allow you to quickly jump to all popular sites on the web.
- zero telemetry, zero tracking
- See how fast is a website or how many ads/trackers it has before clicking the result.
7 Discovering my website’s search
If you want your cool hand-rolled search to magically appear as a search option, you are looking for OpenSearch.
Worked example: Add Google Scholar to your browser
Detailed documentation: opensearch/mediawiki/Specifications/OpenSearch at master · dewitt/opensearch · GitHub