I have used SearXNG for a while, but I switched to LibreX after the search engine started glitching. Recently, though, LibreX has stopped returning any results. I am currently on Mojeek, but the results aren’t that great.

I have also tried Qwant, but I wasn’t too keen on it. Startpage will be impractical, as I use a VPN and this engine often blocks me because of it. I don’t want to use Brave Search for a number of reasons. MetaGer has too many important features behind its paywall. I’m not sure about DuckDuckGo, but I could use it if there was no other option.

Any suggestions, or am I being too picky?

  • MagneticFusion@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I really enjoy Ecosia. They also plant trees if you whitelist your adblocker they need to make money to plant trees which I have done

  • ses hat@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Maybe some will dislike , but i use yandex, i don’t know why, but i get good results. I prefer to give them my info and not google

    • Hellfire103@sopuli.xyzOP
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      1 year ago

      Definitely not. Never mind “out of the frying pan, into the fire”; for me, this is “out of the lake, into the fire”.

      Using Yandex would involve giving my personal data to Russia. The possibility of my data falling into the wrong hands is the main reason I am looking for a private search engine; I’m certainly not then about to just walk up to the wrong hands and say “here you go”. Not to mention the censorship.

      Besides, I’ve blacklisted the .ru, .su, and .рф, .москва, and .yandex TLDs in NextDNS.

      • ses hat@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Well i am far far from Russia so i don’t care, it can’t be worst compared to google. I don’t believe too much in the real privacy, one way or another 3 letter agencies will get the info.

    • Hellfire103@sopuli.xyzOP
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      1 year ago

      It stopped returning results. I tried other instances: same problems. However, I think the issue may have been fixed.

      I am currently on an iPhone, and I’m not really in a position to self-host (although I did try to set up a FreedomBox the other day).

      • orizuru@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        Ah fair enough.

        I started by having it on my laptop, and used it only there. Liked it so much that I’m renting a VPS around $5 a month to have it on all my devices.

        But to be fair, I’m also hosting other things on that VPS (SearXNG is very light), so it’s multi-purpose.

  • Zerush@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    As main search, among others, I use Andisearch, it’s an AI search assistant, with own lenguage model and one of the most private search engine. own reader mode for websites in the search results, so you don’t need to visit it, you also can watch YouTube and others sandboxed right in the search results, anonymous use, no ads, no tracking, no logs.

    https://andisearch.com

    Easy add it to your search engine list in your browser https://andisearch.com/?query=%s

  • PuppyOSAndCoffee@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    A random thought

    Do we really want search engines ?

    Or, do we want AI to tell us the answers to our questions?

    • Hellfire103@sopuli.xyzOP
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      1 year ago

      We want search engines. GPT-3.5 has a knowledge cutoff in 2021, so I only really use it for software recommendations and text/code formatting.