Many “alternative” search engines are better for privacy, but they are still vulnerable to censorship, because they rely on g**gle and m*crosoft’s indices for their search results. This isn’t a deep-hidden secret either, many of them disclose what search index they use on the “about” page, for example:
- https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
- https://support.startpage.com/hc/en-us/articles/5138782571796-Why-isn-t-a-particular-site-appearing-in-the-results
- https://www.ecosia.org/privacy
There are still search engines that (claim to) maintain their own index. Most surprisingly, br*ve:
Yeah. I hope that they provide a way to exclude Brave from the search engines (not optimistic considering the libertarian tech bro tantrum the lead dev threw but…).
But I think the advantage is really the personalized results over anything else. Sometimes you get some REAL fucked up SEO-heavy results. So you just block that site. And then everything works.
It DOES make me more than a bit concerned over how much data they have on me (especially as you need to use an access token to use it in an incognito window… where you are searching for the sketchiest shit) but… google already has that so…
They claim that no information on searches is a saved to an individual for now.
Companies claim a lot of things. Let’s see how the first legal issue plays out
I will say part of the reason I find them more trustworthy is that their business model hinges on some sort of ounce of privacy. Google’s hinges on exactly the opposite.
I strongly encourage reading up on the various VPNs and the like that charge people while still monitoring and tracking everything they do.