this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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Pass. Qwant has had its share of controversies, regardless their results aren't better than DDG.
If Mozilla was serious about this they would run their own Searx instance and let people choose what engines they wanted to use.
https://searx.space/
Reading through the current Qwant privacy policy certainly doesn't alleviate any privacy concerns either....
Mozilla keeps building/buying, then abandoning things. I'm not sure if they're cut out for that project, and in my experience a SearX instance's effectiveness is mostly based on whether there are enough users for the data to be obfuscated, but so few that it doesn't get rate limited...
Certainly some things are rate limited, Brave and Startpage are particularly bad for this. I omit them from my endjinns in Searx settings.
If you can use Google through SearX, isn't Startpage redundant? IIRC they don't ever claim to do anything but proxy Google results.
Yes, except in the case where Google is rate limited. There is/was a Searx instance that regularly got blocked by Google, I do not remember which one though.
After they were purchased by an advertising company? Yes.
Is this instance of searx safe (I cannot self host) Also how is its privacy and performance compared to DDG?
What I linked to is a listing of public Searx instances. You can look at the list and see things like uptime, where they are hosted, etc.
For performance I find it much better than DDG. In the settings page you can choose which search engines you wish to use, for example Brave, Stract, and Qwant. You can also tailor results by adding things like Lemmy, F-Droid, and Anna's Archive.