How about just NOT supporting companies? Having an European company control what gets shown to you is not much of an improvement over having an American one do it…
There are decentralized search engines like SearXNG
The problem with that philosophy is that SearXNG is an aggregator, so if everyone moved to them… who would be paying for the engines that it aggregates?
I agree that no one should ever support a company. But rather establish a set of principles that you want the companies you use to follow, and show no loyalty if they break this.
It is actually the philosophy of !PurchaseWithPurpose@lemmy.world.
SearXNG is in the picture and it’s one of the 3 recommended.
Yeah I just find the title very weird, to me it makes more sense to choose a search engine because it respects your privacy than to “support European companies”
I hadn’t read the “Need help choosing?” part of the picture, so still oupsie on my part 😅 I wish it mentioned that it’s decentralized… but considering it’s aimed at people using Google, I guess that’d be like trying to convert people from twitter/reddit to mastodon/lemmy by geeking out about decentralization and ActivityPub. No one cares, aside from the people who are already using it 😅
Daily reminder that
- Brave’s CEO donates to homophobic organizations and
- Brave is connected to the BAT pay-to-surf scam
Don’t use Brave.
Also reminder that StartPage is majority-owned by American ad company Sytem1
- Brave is based on Chromium and therefore helps contribute to Google having hegemony over web standards.
Always use a Firefox-based browser, even if you think Mozilla sucks.
At least until Ladybird is ready. I hope they are not under too much pressure to rush things so we get a truly independent web browser.
What about Vanadium?
If it relies on Chromium as a base in any way, it is still beholden to Google’s design decisions.
Yup! It is noted in the highlighted text in red. I’ve had several people respond that they didn’t know about it, and would be making the switch away :)
Never had a good feeling about that one.
It’s a shitty “secure” browser to begin with imho
I’m waiting for Servo (I know it’s not a browser) & LadyBird.
I recommend Ecosia!
They’re basically all compromised in one way or another. 😞
For Search, it is about finding the least bad option and hope that they will become more independent. Mojeek (fully independent but poor quality) or Qwant (building own index, but dependent on Bing)
For now I’ll stick with SearXNG, it’s among the first things I get up and running when I distro hop, but I’m glad there are other non-US options to try.
yeah I wish decentralized search engines were more common
I wish Kagi was not American. I was pretty happy with it until America became a thread
Me too. Kagi is the best of them all, including Google.
The only downside? It’s an American company.
Another downside is that is costs $5 a month to use…
How terrible that you have to pay for a product you use
No one wanting to pay for anything is what got us into this mess in the first place
I was thinking about the aspect of privacy. Not only do you need a user, you also have to give them your payment details.
And don’t get me started on their “300 searches a month”-bullshit. If I pay for 300 searches, I want my 300 searches. Regardless of how long it takes me to use it.
You can sign up to Kagi and pay anonymously, they state how to do it in their FAQ’s.
Very strange to put Kagi as “less private” when it’s the only non-self-hosted option that allows for completely private searches with their Privacy Pass tokens. You can access them with Tor, pay with crypto (not really that private though), and sign up with a fake email. https://kagi.com/privacy#anonymity
It isn’t marked as less private. It is grayed out because it is not based in Europe. I personally use them as I find them the best option with what is out there.
The text at the bottom says “kagi doesn’t collect any identifying data, but does require an account, so it is considered less private than the alternatives”.
Bitcoin isn’t private at all. It’s a very transparent cryptocurrency.
I didn’t say bitcoin and I called out not really private in my comment.
I’m just adding extra info to your comment. They take payment in Bitcoin, but crypto like Monero is private, which they don’t take.
Oh ok
Worth noting about Startpage: they’re part of System1, an American advertising/marketing company. Sytem1 claims that privacy is one of the biggest focuses though. Make of that what you will.
Pretty weak chart to not even include “I care most about porn search”
Yacy. Self hosted p2p ( or local only ) search engine. Crawl the Web yourself.
What kind of storage space does it take up, and how good are the results?
Of course, it depends on how you set the crawler, i.e. how deep because of subdomains and how far links to other domains etc. are.
I crawl 71 pages: My index is currently 4,576,319 documents ( i crawled sites like github too )and occupies just under 14GB
The results depend on several factors. For example, whether you only use local or p2p. But then it also has a number of settings and you can also explicitly control what is responsible for the results down to the smallest detail. But I have to be honest and say that I haven’t dealt with this at all (especially since it’s a bit complex in some cases) because I want to expand my list of pages to crawl myself first and I only use it locally. I still regularly use duckduckgo to search. However, if you take the time for it you will get what you want in terms of quality of results.
Ah well, depending on how you set up the crawler, it consumes system resources accordingly. However, you can set and limit the utilization of RAM and storage space. The same goes for network utilization, which is pretty important because otherwise no other connections would be possible besides crawling xD
This is exciting, TBH.
I’m going to try it out! Storage space be damned 😂
looks really good, something to rewrite in Rust some day!
Thanks. This I nice little guide, easy to suss and helps me figure my priorities.
Is there something like Weebly from Europe?
Sadly I don’t have that answer on the top of my head. Maybe ask in !PurchaseWithPurpose@lemmy.world to whether others might be able to help.
I’ve been happy with DDG for so long. Uuugh.
Honestly I shopped around a lot and tried various services for 7 days each. In the end I came back to DDG because it’s the most useful engine to me. It delivers results I look for and doesn’t get in the way.
As a result I’m not quite satisfied, but it will have to do for now.
