I’m stuck with what to choose. I prioritise speed and privacy
I guess i’m doing pros and cons for all of them now:
Startpage Pros - uses google’s search results and anonymous view, eu based Cons - Bought my an ad company
Qwant Pros - eu based Cons - lots of ads, sometimes a bug where it is in france
DDG pros - faster than the other two, Cons - https://techrights.org/o/2020/07/02/ddg-privacy-abuser-in-disguise/
I’d say none will be private in the long term. Acquisitions ultimately break that eventually. It’s hard to run a successful service and not get acquired, eventually. So, I have a self-hosted searxng instance. DDG has already started moving away from privacy and Startpage has some signs it might be moving that way in the near future. I’ll let others comment on the current state of things at each, but if you give your search to any profit driven company it has the potential to be sold. But IMHO Qwant is currently the best option outside of metasearch engines with small nonprofit ownership, whoch can be unreliable, or self hosting.
Qwant has some reasonable privacy concerns its self as it sends your ip and stuff etc to microsoft.
how to find a good searxng instance, as all the ones i have found are rubbish (self hosting isnt an option.)
https://searx.space/
Problem is that if a site gets too popular, then the search engines like google tend to start rate limiting. Before in started self hosting I jumped around every couple of months to a new server.
I have found one I somewhat like but after looking further I found 4get.ch or something like that, it’s results where better the searx and it looked nicer and it’s quicker
I thought self hosting a searxng instance was like really bad due to you being the only user on it?
What’s wrong with being the only one on it?