This is pretty much a. Follow up to my post yesterday and was wondering which search engine to use, I’m leaning stlightly towards mullvad as it is a more reputable and they get their results exclusively from braves index but 4get is open source and has an official instance.
Either is pretty good. If you’re looking for more diverse options I’d recommend 4get or a half decent Whoogle or SearxNG instance.
But you’re right that you do have to trust the person or group running it, and I think Mullvad has the upper hand there. It’s big enough to attract a crowd, and its caching means the results are extra generic too.
If you’re looking just for Google results, Startpage is… Fine, I think.
Running a VPN makes any of these options much better.
Give Kagi a look – it’s not free though. My free trial has ended but I’m considering shelling out for it.
The fact that it uses Brave’s index is partly what puts me off using Mullvad Leta.
How come? You can swap to google, but google is bad with censorship. I would have said braves index is the best independent index (other than google). Main reason I won’t use brave is it not being open source search engine. With this I get best of both worlds.
Well I’m not a fan of Brave or Google as companies for individual reasons, look up about Brave’s CEO for example.
I prefer to use an aggregator so at the moment I’m using searxng; the main downside I’ve found is that instances tend to get blocked from indexes eventually so you do have to move around a bit.
But this isn’t using brave?
I mean I would think twice about using them as a single source for search, the same as I would think twice about using Google as a single source. That’s why I prefer to use an aggregator.
4get has more features and supports more indexes.
I get that but I’m honestly not that fussed about features or index’s 99 times out of 100 my search is just a simple one to find a specific website or news article
Used leta for a short period, but it was down annoyingly often
Was this during beta?