I’ve recently learned that DDG does not follow its own guidelines for privacy. I’m curious what search engines people here would recommend. I would prefer a search engine that not only respects my privacy but also doesn’t hide or shadow ban content it doesn’t like. Any recommendations?

  • Vexz@feddit.deEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Some thoughts from a long term SearXNG user: While I really appreciate how privacy respecting SearXNG is I had a lot of trouble with it. Often enough you get 0 results because of timeouts with the search engines it uses and sometimes the order of the presented search results isn’t good. Sometimes the thing I’ve been searching for was the 10th result while in other search engines it was the first result. So the prioritizing of the results is often enough just odd.

    We live in a time where there are so many search engines but all of them have their flaws. It’s really frustrating. :(

    • Melody FwygonEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I recommend finding a different instance then. Not every instance is going to be great at it, and you do have to do a lot of fiddling around with preferences and be-bopping between various instances when the current instance is timing out.

      …Or you could just hit F5 and try your search query again. For some reason that seems to work sometimes. It is possible to configure an instance to not get slammed; and you can host one yourself too

      • Vexz@feddit.deEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        The problem is that it doesn’t matter which instance I use. I tried multiple instances, even self-hosted one myself. Sooner or later I always had the problem with timeouts (even with my self-hosted local instance) and it’s so damn annoying. Even refreshing the page doesn’t always help. I really don’t feel like hopping from instance to instance just because my preferred instance has timeouts again. Reliability is crucial to me.

        • Melody FwygonEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Did you check the preferences on the instance and change the default engine selections? You can check the engines and de-select engines that are turning out to be unreliable with results; which should result in fewer errors.

          • Vexz@feddit.deEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            Of course I did. The thing is that the reliability of the search engines per instance varies from time to time so there’s not a single instance that will always work perfectly and never has timeouts.