[–] mostlyfriendly 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
Honest question: Are you dumping on DDG for being bad at search or for not being really anonymous? If the 2nd point, do you care to elaborate?
[–] anonnynonny 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago (edited ago)
I don't necessarily agree, but this post presents an argument.
Additionally, they pull results from yahoo/bing/etc, which mean it is heavily reliant on third party algorithms which can manipulate results.
FWIW, I mainly use DDG myself, but searx, being open-source, is a more interesting alternative in my opinion.
Any server->client search engine inherently has the problem of blind trust... You have to blindly trust that they are doing what they say they are doing (or not doing) - verification is highly difficult, if not impossible.
YaCy potentially solves that issue, since it's p2p... but from what I understand it has a long way to go before it's really a viable alternative.
[–] 8471127? 1 point 2 points 3 points (+3|-1) ago
I don't understand how Google had better search algorithms 15 years ago than DDG has now. I try switching every year or so, but goddamn their search just sucks. It shits the bed if you give it a query that requires even mild parsing and grouping of terms. God help you if you're looking for information that isn't common knowledge or is a deep query into an API, SDK, or aspect of an engineering discipline.
[–] 8471253? 1 point 3 points 4 points (+4|-1) ago
They're definitely worse, especially for any news or history-based search where they bias the results to an extreme degree. No, I don't care about what some celebrity or propaganda site said about this news item, I care about an accurate historical record of events.
[–] lowcarblivin 0 points 4 points 4 points (+4|-0) ago
In the meantime I use https://yandex.com .. It has organic search results like Google used to.
[–] throughtheblack 0 points 5 points 5 points (+5|-0) ago (edited ago)
It may be worth looking into YaCy. It is a decentralized P2P open source search engine you run on your own computer. It doesn't store searches and they cannot be censored. I don't think it is anywhere near as fast and refined as google yet, but I think something like this may be the best option for replacing google in the future. There is no central server for the government to control.
[–] whatisbestinlife 0 points 3 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago
this would be good in those local intranet wifi boxes they were planning on voat or a chan. sounds like we might have a patchy pirate mesh network in the near future
[–] Hey_Sunshine 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Pirate mesh network? sounds awesome.
[–] raw 2 points 9 points 11 points (+11|-2) ago
There exists. It's called startpage.com It uses Google search but keeps you anonymous. You request data from startpage, they request the same data from Google and deliver via their server. With millions of search from different users, it's not possible to single out a particular user. It is even the default search engine in Tor browser.
[–] superesper ago (edited ago)
Half the reason Google is shit is that it filters your results. Goign to another site to get Google results is missing the point. Searx is a good private search.
[–] raw 1 point -1 points 0 points (+0|-1) ago
Google filters results to pander to it's users. For instance, if I search for some politics, infowars will be my top result if I am a conservative and CNN will be my top result if I am a liberal. So, Google will filter my results according to me. And startpage will help you prevent that filtering.
But also, I don't know if filtering is good or bad. For instance, if I search for 'bra' Google knows that I am a male physicist, so my top results will be about Dirac Bra rathar than a piece of clothing because that is most probably what I am searching for.
[–] anonnynonny 0 points 8 points 8 points (+8|-0) ago
You're still required to give inherent trust to the proxy service. You have no guarantee that you aren't being logged. So you're actually doubling the amount of blind trust you have to hand out... first to the man in the middle startpage, then to google.
It's a workaround, not a solution.
[–] [deleted] 0 points 18 points 18 points (+18|-0) ago
[–] TrueAmerican 1 point 1 point 2 points (+2|-1) ago
Yeah lets all be cavemen again.. brilliant solution..
[–] anonnynonny 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
Searx is an open-source search engine. searx.me is one implementation of it.
Depending on your level of paranoia, trusting an individual implementation of searx may not be acceptible, but that inherent trust is applicable to ANY server-hosted service.
IMO Searx is the closest thing we have to a "working, anonymous substitution" at this point in time.