Apple held talks with DuckDuckGo to replace Alphabet's Google as the default search engine for the private mode on Apple's Safari browser, the Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the discussions.
This is a copy/pasted message I wrote up on another thread. As long as there are people in the comments shilling kagi, I will shill my prefered engines. At least my suggestions will bring awareness to free as in freedom projects. I hope to god people paying 10$/month just to not get datacucked by search engines will also learn something and save their money.
SearX/SearXNG is a free and open source, highly customizable, and self-hostable meta search engine. SearX instances act as a middle man, they query other search engines for you, stripping all their spyware ad crap and never having your connection touch their servers. Of course you have to trust the SearX instance host with your query information, but again if you are that paranoid just self host.
I personally trust some foss loving sysadmin that host social services for free out of alturism, who also accepts hosting donations, whos server is located on the other side of the planet, with my query info over Google/Alphabet any day.
Its nice to be able to email and have a human conversation with your search engine provider thats just a knowlegable every day joe who genuinely believes in the project and freely dedicates their resources to it. Consider sending some cash their way to help with upkeep if you like the services they provide, they will probably appreciate and make use of that 10$ better than kagi.
Heres a list of all public searx instances, I personally prefer to use paulgo.io
All SearX instances are configured different to index different engines. If one doesn’t seem to give good results try a few others.
Did I mention it has bangs like duckduckgo? If you really need google like for maps and buisness info just use !!g in the query
search.marginalia.nu is a completely novel search engine written and hosted by one dude that aims to prioritize indexing lighter websites little to no javascript as these tend to be personal websites and homepages that have poor SEO and the big search engines won’t index well. If you remember the internet of the early 2000s and want a nostalgia trip this ones for you. Its also open source and self-hostable
Finally, YaCy is another completely novel search engine that uses peer-to-peer technology to power a big webcrawler which prioritizes indexes based off user queries and feedback. Everyone can download yacy and devote a bit of their computing power to both run their own local instance and help out a collective search engine. Companies can also download yacy and use it to index their private intranets.
They have a public instance available through a web portal. To be upfront, YaCy is not a great search engine for what most people usually want, which is quick and relevant information within the first few clicks. But, it is an interesting use of technology and what a true honest-to-god community-operated search engine looks like untainted by SEO scores or corporate money-making shenanigans.
I hope this has been informative to those who believe theres only a few options to pick from, I know these options are so unknown to most people.
Thank you! So I can use Google but stop it from doing the CAPCHA shit repeatedly because it detects my VPN? It’s abuse of the user and I’m tired of it.
I’m sure that’s what Google wants. You can either give them your data or you can go somewhere else, but hopefully you choose to give them your data because they make it too inconvenient not to.
I’m trying Kagi now but I’m having mixed feelings. Search results are mixed at best for some pretty commonplace topics (e.g. Starfield quests or breaking news).
Also, the search limit (for the trial and basic plans) stresses me and I find myself second guessing whether I really need to search for something. I like it but I haven’t come across a “wow!” moment that makes me want to abandon DDG, despite the transparency and privacy-focus.
what transparency and “privacy focus” are you talking about?
They haven’t released a single line of code and they required you to be logged in, which makes you uniquely identifiable, and if you paid using credit card, then you gave away your personal identifiable information.
When you need a scalable service for tons of users, federated isn’t going to cut it. This is why Apple wants DDG. Point the bajillion crApple lusers at one of your public instances (or even all of them chosen at random each time) and watch it crash and burn overnight. DDG has tons of servers and the infrastructure to hold up while a ton of people search why their luxury device is slowing down every time Apple releases a new one.
Lol Federation is the definition of scalable. Everyone serves their local users -> a miniscule amount of global traffic, everything but auth always stays local.
Universities have been doing it since the beginning of the internet. Email is the biggest example but there are others: eduGAIN and eduroam are the most notable ones coming out of the academic community.
You are confusing a network of distinct servers with a single point of entry that a search engine would need to be. There is no fallback or distribution of search when everything is directed to a single search point, and pointing people to different search sites per search will remove any per-site preferences.
Do people think about what they say any more, or do they see someone who is trying to carefully explain their problem and just go into pure rage and try to disprove them by spewing things that do not make any sense?
No search engine has a “single point of entry”. Every search engine has Cache servers all over the world at almost every major IXP. Nothing would prevent a federated service from operating the same way. Cloudflare or literally any form of loadbalancer or load balancing service could be used to redirect queries to fedisearch (or whatever the service name would be) to the local instance by IP geolocation. Authentication can just be forwarded to the home server via SAML, thats also where the settings can be stored and queried at login time by the local instance. SAML assertions are very scalable, and there needs to be no global login server, since every users login query can be forwarded to his home instance, where his profile is loaded. The full search index could be put into a blockchain that every local instance joins - every instance crawls their area and publishes new results to the chain.
You seem to know very little about how the internet works, yet you accuse me of raging.
That the foss community can manage things like that has been proven for years. Debian mirror server network works in a similar way (they run their own loadbalancer ofc), while being cryptographically secure. And if you wanna see a federated login network like i described in action, just go to https://pubs.acs.org/action/ssostart
All these parts i described are existing technology and in global use. The combination is not, but there is nothing that would prevent a foundation from implementing search like this.
My issue with SearXNG is that I cannot natively use it on mobile (iOS). Might be a small issue for most but I need to be able to type into my browser’s search bar and it utilize that search engine. Open browser > navigate to search homepage > enter query is a lot slower, especially if I am out and about and need information quickly.
If there is some way to configure this I’d love to hear about it, but Safari on iOS limits you to a handful of search engines. I use DDG today.
searchengine.party also has the query string links for a multitude of different search engines, as well as a comparison of security tests and privacy policies and other functions
I don’t know what the fuck is going on with Kagi on Lemmy. They must be using bots or paying people for promoting them. I just don’t get how people can trust them so much when they haven’t released the code for anything, they require you to be logged in which makes the user uniquely identifiable and therefore could easily correlate your searches to your identity (even if they claim not to, it’s just a “trust me, bro”)
Would also recommend whoogle. They have done public ones iirc but also hand a self hosted option (that I use behind a VPN) for those that line self hosted shit
i have tried these alternate search engines and I have to always come back to google. A friend I trust a lot swears that kagi is the best search engine, and so do other people I know, so it must have some merit.
This is a copy/pasted message I wrote up on another thread. As long as there are people in the comments shilling kagi, I will shill my prefered engines. At least my suggestions will bring awareness to free as in freedom projects. I hope to god people paying 10$/month just to not get datacucked by search engines will also learn something and save their money.
SearX/SearXNG is a free and open source, highly customizable, and self-hostable meta search engine. SearX instances act as a middle man, they query other search engines for you, stripping all their spyware ad crap and never having your connection touch their servers. Of course you have to trust the SearX instance host with your query information, but again if you are that paranoid just self host.
I personally trust some foss loving sysadmin that host social services for free out of alturism, who also accepts hosting donations, whos server is located on the other side of the planet, with my query info over Google/Alphabet any day.
Its nice to be able to email and have a human conversation with your search engine provider thats just a knowlegable every day joe who genuinely believes in the project and freely dedicates their resources to it. Consider sending some cash their way to help with upkeep if you like the services they provide, they will probably appreciate and make use of that 10$ better than kagi.
Heres a list of all public searx instances, I personally prefer to use paulgo.io All SearX instances are configured different to index different engines. If one doesn’t seem to give good results try a few others.
Did I mention it has bangs like duckduckgo? If you really need google like for maps and buisness info just use !!g in the query
search.marginalia.nu is a completely novel search engine written and hosted by one dude that aims to prioritize indexing lighter websites little to no javascript as these tend to be personal websites and homepages that have poor SEO and the big search engines won’t index well. If you remember the internet of the early 2000s and want a nostalgia trip this ones for you. Its also open source and self-hostable
Finally, YaCy is another completely novel search engine that uses peer-to-peer technology to power a big webcrawler which prioritizes indexes based off user queries and feedback. Everyone can download yacy and devote a bit of their computing power to both run their own local instance and help out a collective search engine. Companies can also download yacy and use it to index their private intranets.
They have a public instance available through a web portal. To be upfront, YaCy is not a great search engine for what most people usually want, which is quick and relevant information within the first few clicks. But, it is an interesting use of technology and what a true honest-to-god community-operated search engine looks like untainted by SEO scores or corporate money-making shenanigans.
I hope this has been informative to those who believe theres only a few options to pick from, I know these options are so unknown to most people.
Thank you! So I can use Google but stop it from doing the CAPCHA shit repeatedly because it detects my VPN? It’s abuse of the user and I’m tired of it.
Yup! Enjoy :)
I rage quit Google search the other day over that damn captcha
I’m trying Startpage until I get those alternatives down
I’m sure that’s what Google wants. You can either give them your data or you can go somewhere else, but hopefully you choose to give them your data because they make it too inconvenient not to.
Abuse of the user 🤣
Have you seen users privacy settings? They want their data to be harvested. Now come here and let me give you some sponsored content.
I use Kagi right now but search.marginalia.nu and YaCy seem really cool. Hell, I might package YaCy and write a module for it for NixOS :^)
I’m trying Kagi now but I’m having mixed feelings. Search results are mixed at best for some pretty commonplace topics (e.g. Starfield quests or breaking news).
Also, the search limit (for the trial and basic plans) stresses me and I find myself second guessing whether I really need to search for something. I like it but I haven’t come across a “wow!” moment that makes me want to abandon DDG, despite the transparency and privacy-focus.
what transparency and “privacy focus” are you talking about?
They haven’t released a single line of code and they required you to be logged in, which makes you uniquely identifiable, and if you paid using credit card, then you gave away your personal identifiable information.
uuuuusing it
When you need a scalable service for tons of users, federated isn’t going to cut it. This is why Apple wants DDG. Point the bajillion crApple lusers at one of your public instances (or even all of them chosen at random each time) and watch it crash and burn overnight. DDG has tons of servers and the infrastructure to hold up while a ton of people search why their luxury device is slowing down every time Apple releases a new one.
Lol Federation is the definition of scalable. Everyone serves their local users -> a miniscule amount of global traffic, everything but auth always stays local.
Universities have been doing it since the beginning of the internet. Email is the biggest example but there are others: eduGAIN and eduroam are the most notable ones coming out of the academic community.
You are confusing a network of distinct servers with a single point of entry that a search engine would need to be. There is no fallback or distribution of search when everything is directed to a single search point, and pointing people to different search sites per search will remove any per-site preferences.
Do people think about what they say any more, or do they see someone who is trying to carefully explain their problem and just go into pure rage and try to disprove them by spewing things that do not make any sense?
No search engine has a “single point of entry”. Every search engine has Cache servers all over the world at almost every major IXP. Nothing would prevent a federated service from operating the same way. Cloudflare or literally any form of loadbalancer or load balancing service could be used to redirect queries to fedisearch (or whatever the service name would be) to the local instance by IP geolocation. Authentication can just be forwarded to the home server via SAML, thats also where the settings can be stored and queried at login time by the local instance. SAML assertions are very scalable, and there needs to be no global login server, since every users login query can be forwarded to his home instance, where his profile is loaded. The full search index could be put into a blockchain that every local instance joins - every instance crawls their area and publishes new results to the chain. You seem to know very little about how the internet works, yet you accuse me of raging.
That the foss community can manage things like that has been proven for years. Debian mirror server network works in a similar way (they run their own loadbalancer ofc), while being cryptographically secure. And if you wanna see a federated login network like i described in action, just go to https://pubs.acs.org/action/ssostart
All these parts i described are existing technology and in global use. The combination is not, but there is nothing that would prevent a foundation from implementing search like this.
My issue with SearXNG is that I cannot natively use it on mobile (iOS). Might be a small issue for most but I need to be able to type into my browser’s search bar and it utilize that search engine. Open browser > navigate to search homepage > enter query is a lot slower, especially if I am out and about and need information quickly.
If there is some way to configure this I’d love to hear about it, but Safari on iOS limits you to a handful of search engines. I use DDG today.
I did a quick search and found instructions to what I think you are asking for hopefully this helps. The query string for paulgo.io is “https://paulgo.io/search?q=”
I have also heard Xsearch works
searchengine.party also has the query string links for a multitude of different search engines, as well as a comparison of security tests and privacy policies and other functions
xSearch on the AppStore lets you use any search engine with Safari.
Hey just to update I heard XSearch works if that other thing didn’t work out
I don’t know what the fuck is going on with Kagi on Lemmy. They must be using bots or paying people for promoting them. I just don’t get how people can trust them so much when they haven’t released the code for anything, they require you to be logged in which makes the user uniquely identifiable and therefore could easily correlate your searches to your identity (even if they claim not to, it’s just a “trust me, bro”)
Yeah it’s ridiculous, seems like there’s a shill army of this proprietary service here.
Shilling means that you’re claiming people (like me) who’ve been recommending Kagi are in fact secretly paid to do covert advertising.
Are you using that word wrong, or do you actually believe that we’re all liars?
Saved. Thank you for your time and thoroughness!
thank you, great post
Would also recommend whoogle. They have done public ones iirc but also hand a self hosted option (that I use behind a VPN) for those that line self hosted shit
i have tried these alternate search engines and I have to always come back to google. A friend I trust a lot swears that kagi is the best search engine, and so do other people I know, so it must have some merit.