quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
So, did we all cease using FuckFuckNo?

Yup. Evaluating both Qwant and Brave search engines.

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
So, did we all cease using FuckFuckNo?

I can only speak for myself - absolutely nuked it from all of my devices. All favorites and shortcuts deleted and haven't visited since I posted the original thread. Only issue I have is we use Chrome on work computers and it doesn't have Brave as a default search option. I'm having to use Bing there. I use Brave on personal devices with Brave Search as my default search option.

I've gone to brave search & it's working OK. I didn't really love ddg vs google. When I switched to brave, the built in search sucked. Now it seems to work better.

Trying Brave. Seems to work well enough so far.

Qwant has more options than Brave and I found that Brave adopted Qwant several years back as their default browser search engine for a number of European countries. Both are heavily into protecting privacy.

Bottom line is that I'm finding Qwant more mature than Brave. But I suspect the gap will narrow in the future.

I have also been using Qwant and Brave for a couple of years now. Pretty happy with that combo.

An article about search engines:

10 Privacy Oriented Alternative Search Engines To Google
https://itsfoss.com/privacy-search-engines/

I picked one off the list that claims to be
uncensored and non-tracking:

"Gibiru is a privacy-friendly search engine that aims for uncensored search results. It doesn’t enforce any trackers, but it recommends you utilize a VPN of their choice in addition to their search engine service, in order to prevent other websites to track your activity.

The search results may not be the best around – but it puts some interesting uncensored search results."

https://gibiru.com/

As a trial I used the search terms "Biden's Laptop" and got a quick list of links that don't seem to be politically censored, under a list entitled " All RESULTS."


Next to it is a link entitled "Censored."

Might be fun to play with various political trigger terms and see how they compare.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: RichardC,

Today I decided to give Qwant search a whirl in my Firefox browser (macOS). I installed its extension but specifically did not make Qwant default until I had a chance to play around with it. I worked on some other stuff for a while and hit my home page button... damn if Qwant hadn't overrode my settings to change my home page. It did this without asking for permission or confirmation. I use the default Firefox homepage with 4 rows of pinned shortcuts so Qwant blithely overriding that kinda pissed me off.

Being as it committed a cardinal sin I blew out Qwant posthaste. Under no circumstances will I tolerate an extension that screws with my browser settings.

Just a heads up in case anyone using Firefox is considering Qwant. I don't know how it acts in other browsers but in Firefox keep a close eye on it.

Does Brave Search filter, downrank, or censor search results?
No, Brave Search does not filter, downrank, or censor search results. Nor will we change our search algorithm to increase or decrease the prominence of results in response to current events or anyone’s political, religious, ethical, or other beliefs. Brave Search—like Brave itself—is intended to be a user-first portal to the web, free of Big Tech’s manipulation.

However, there is one exception to this rule: We do need to comply with laws governing search engines, including CSAM, copyright takedown (DMCA), right to be forgotten (GDPR), and nation-state orders.

A few additional notes:

For a small percentage of queries where we don’t have good results, we’ll check Bing for server-side fallback mixing.
If you’ve chosen to enable it, we can also check Google for fallback mixing in your browser.
We rely on Bing for most image and video results.
For each of the cases above, if the results are censored, filtered, or re-ranked at the source, those changes would also pass through to our results. You can easily see how often these third-party results are mixed (via our independence score), and our aim is to gradually reduce this mixing over time.

https://brave.com/search/#censorship
_____________________________________________________________________________________

YaCy – The decentralized, open source, peer-to-peer search engine

Jurisdiction: Not applicable. (Being a decentralized and open-source platform, YaCy does not appear to fall under any particular jurisdiction, similar to Searx.)

Search results: Peer-to-peer crawler model

YaCy is an open source private search engine created in 2004 by Michael Christen. It can run stand-alone or as part of a decentralized peer-to-peer network. Here is a brief description from YaCy’s website:

It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world’s users.

With YaCy, there is no central server, which could be seized or tapped by authorities. Rather, all peers in the network are equal and can be used for crawling the web or in “proxy mode” to index pages for other users. To use YaCy, you need to download the free software on your operating system, available for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. There is a demo portal here to test things out.

https://yacy.net/

quote:

Originally posted by Audioholic:
For a small percentage of queries where we don’t have good results, we’ll check Bing for server-side fallback mixing.
If you’ve chosen to enable it, we can also check Google for fallback mixing in your browser.
We rely on Bing for most image and video results.
For each of the cases above, if the results are censored, filtered, or re-ranked at the source, those changes would also pass through to our results. You can easily see how often these third-party results are mixed (via our independence score), and our aim is to gradually reduce this mixing over time.

And as previously said, Qwant is more mature than Brave which is still in beta.

"Google fallback mixing:
For queries where Brave Search is not yet refined, your browser will anonymously check Google for the same query, mix the results for you and send the query data back to us so we can improve Brave Search for everyone."
This is anonymous even if you have a Google account.

quote:

Originally posted by RichardC:
YaCy – The decentralized, open source, peer-to-peer search engine

"YaCy Installation in Windows
Please install Java 8 first, the automatic Java installation within YaCy does not work any more."

That's a non-starter for me with Java as it may be among the most insecure pieces of software on any computer.

Looks like DDG is becoming Yet Another Rotten Big Tech Company:

quote:

DuckDuckGo, the search engine with a reputation for respecting its users’ privacy, has come under fire for entering a search agreement with Microsoft to allow the Big Tech giant to monitor certain details about its users on its browser.

According to Bleeping Computer, security researcher Zach Edwards detailed how even though DuckDuckGo blocks Google and Facebook trackers, the search platform provided an exception for Microsoft trackers to function.

Full article: DuckDuckGo slammed for allowing Microsoft trackers on its browser