Brave is sketch as fuck and it’s ceo is a creep.

iirc Brave has a terrible policy Not good More like … a honeypot

At least Ecosia supposedly plants lots of trees (which we desperately need)

We need like a quadrillion NET more trees than we have right now

it’s not just carbon sinks it’s also water vapor (evapotranspiration) it either forms clouds that rain (if lots of trees) or it just makes the atmosphere hotter

the internet has a big physical footprint

i don’t think tokens help.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/search-engines/

I initially thought this domain was a content farm, all generated articles. But reading through it, looking at the history, looking at the context, on the balance of probabilities it looks like a human actually wrote these.

When introducing articles to a domain that looks suspicious, you got to give us more context than a link. Everyone’s going to think it’s just spam

Brave reminds me of early Google. I’m old enough to remember using Google because it was a privacy-respecting service. I’m just waiting for Brave to sell its users out, because if there’s one thing its CEO is good at, it’s that. He’s a money-hungry rat.

Qwant boldly claims not to know anything about you, but will use location data from your IP to personalize search results. I find that extremely untrustworthy, especially because they literally say “the search engine that doesn’t know anything about you” on their homepage, which is an obvious lie.

I use Startpage, but it’s worth noting that it is primarily owned by System1, which is an advertising agency. ~~I use them, but I’m always a bit hesitant to recommend them.~~They’re another one that seems like it could be a bait-and-switch, in the long run. I no longer use nor recommend Startpage.

I’m not sure which features SearXNG people might think are missing since the public instances I use are highly customizable, even compared to mainline search engines like Google or Bing. If anything, it might feel overwhelming to users who aren’t used to having so much control over their search engine. I had a weird experience with a SearXNG instance recently where I searched “al.ost,” but it kept insisting I meant “almost” and persisted in providing results for “almost,” no matter what syntax I tried. This was extremely troubling to me and leads me to question whether I will continue to use it going forward. I’m looking for a search engine that only provides results based on the actual terms I enter. I’m so done with sites that try to do the thinking for me.

Just my two cents on a few of these. Obviously, much of this is highly opinionated on my part.

MAJOR UPDATE: I searched for an address within Startpage yesterday, and now I’ve noticed results are being tailored to that location (I was in another city at the time), so I can no longer recommend Startpage. I will continue my search for a search engine that does not adapt search results based on machine learning, but only serves results based on deliberate input from the user (search terms entered and syntax).

DuckDuckGo HTML seems to fit the bill, at first glance.

Is searx/searxng the only open source search engine available out there?