I’ve seen a lot of discourse over which browsers we use and I myself have made the switch from brave to firefox. I still use brave as my search engine though, so… which do yall recommend? Is brave’s engine necessarily bad to use? I personally like its ui/theme.

  • sorrybookbroke@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    I use startpage which is a google proxy. So, it does what duckduckgo does with bing but with google instead. Searx is also a great option. Neither have their own crawler though

    As for the brave engine there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. In fact, I’d argue it’s much safer than google, bing, or the proxies of each. While proxying you can still be fingerprinted. With brave only brave could do that and I trust them not to more than most.

    You should be cautious though, as brave has had some privacy issues before injecting affiliate links which would track you when going to ecommerce sites.

    Of course, the brave CEO is a piece of shit though. Full on covid conspiracy lab made Fauci plandemic ivermectin type stuff, believes that gay marriage should be illegal while donating to anti-gay orgs, and otherwise uses his position to further far right ideas. He also tries to fund weird micro nation projects with the goal of creating anarcho-capitalist heavens in the ocean. Think bioshock, but crypto bro. All around weird guy

    All this said, I’d still argue from a privacy perspective brave is a perfectly reasonable option. The company has one privacy controversy but that’s better than the big two. I’ll stick to startpage though for political reasons, until I find something with good enough results that’s fully independent and moral. Currently looking at mojeek myself

      • sorrybookbroke@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        Oh shit, hey! Been a bit since I’ve said this but I’m happy to answer. I’ll admit I don’t remember exactly where, but I had asked about a privacy respecting independant search engine in a few matrix chats and separately did a bit of searching on startpage. It’s likely one of those two places I first found it but word of mouth through matrix is what convinced me to use it

        I’ve been liking the service btw, I think you guys are doing something fantastic

        • Mojeek@lemmy.ml
          3·
          6 months ago

          thank you kindly, that is great to hear; we’ve got this new and even better (so far testing is showing that) algo ready to go too: https://www.mojeek.com/eval so hopefully it’ll be even more fantastic-er soon :D

  • Xusontha@ls.buckodr.ink
    0·
    9 months ago

    I personally use Ecosia, it’s got a pretty decent privacy policy (esp compared to google/microsoft) and it uses Bing’s index so the results are pretty good. The main selling point is they use 100% of their profits for planting trees. The quality of the results is 99% of the time fine but if I ever get something I can’t find (or if I’m doing an image search) you can just add #g to your search to search google.

    It’s overall a pretty good search engine by itself, but the fact it plants trees pushes it leagues ahead of the others for me