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1. Embed this notice
   Fabio Manganiello (blacklight@social.platypush.tech)'s status on Tuesday, 30-Aug-2022 17:11:48 JST Fabio Manganiello

   #searchengines #selfhost

   I got tired of putting my trust search engines that run on somebody else's machine.

   DuckDuckGo blocks all trackers, but it silently whitelists Microsoft's (because of the commercial agreement they have with Bing), except that they failed to mention it until they were caught with their hands in the jar.

   Startpage is Dutch, it's notoriously sensitive on privacy and it's been around for longer than Google, but it's now been acquired by an ads company and I don't see things going well for it.

   Brave claims to be the ultimate solution for privacy, except when they put some crypto miner to run in your browser so they can make a bit of extra money on the side.

   So I've decided to take even this matter into my hands and run my own search engine. You can access it at https://search.fabiomanganiello.com. It runs SearXNG in a Docker container on one of my servers at home. It's a bit slower than major search engines, but not that much, and it's still a little price I'm ready to pay for freedom.

   • smallcircles (Humane Tech Now) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Jeremiah Lee (jeremiahlee@social.librem.one)'s status on Tuesday, 30-Aug-2022 20:32:12 JST Jeremiah Lee

     in reply to

     • smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)

     @blacklight @humanetech Updated information: DuckDuckGo has removed the carve-out for Microsoft. https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-scripts/?guccounter=2

   • Embed this notice
     Fabio Manganiello (blacklight@social.platypush.tech)'s status on Tuesday, 30-Aug-2022 20:34:58 JST Fabio Manganiello

     in reply to

     • koherecoWatchdog
     • Nick @ The Linux Experiment

     @koherecoWatchdog this is a trade-off that I'm very happy to discuss.

     I've thought of dropping DDG (and maybe Brave) results entirely. I'm a big fan of Mojeek, but there's a trade-off between privacy purism and relevance of the results that I'm still trying to strike here.

     As an example: a search of my name on Mojeek won't return any links to my content on LinkedIn, Medium, or CF-powered websites like Hackernoon, dev.to, IoT4All, BetterProgramming. Nor any links to my books (because they are sold on the likes of Amazon, eBay, ebooks.com or springer.com), nor any links to my music (because, outside of Bandcamp, it's on the likes of Spotify, Tidal etc.), nor any links to my past talks (because they are mostly on YouTube).

     Yes, it reports the links to my self-hosted websites and my apps on F-Droid, but those are only a small fraction on the content about me on the web. And the same considerations that apply to searching my name apply to any other search that a user may want to perform. Even the most privacy-aware user wouldn't want to use a search engine that shows to them only a fraction of the web. It should probably be their choice if they want to click on a result hosted on Amazon or Medium. The search engine can ensure that their privacy is protected and that it doesn't collect any private data about users (or that could associate users to queries), but IMHO it shouldn't omit results that may be relevant for what the user actually needs to do.

     If users can't find what they're looking for, they'll just fall back on another search engine, which defeats the whole purpose of running an alternative engine. And, if users fall back on another search engine too often, they'll eventually just stop using yours - a point that @thelinuxEXP made quite well in a recent video.

   • Embed this notice
     koherecowatchdog@freeradical.zone's status on Tuesday, 30-Aug-2022 20:34:59 JST koherecoWatchdog

     in reply to

     @blacklight Some searx instances are fed by a locally running #yacy which does the crawling, so you can also get a greater degree of independence from the giants. I noticed a lot of your results grab from both DDG & Qwant. Both DDG & Qwant are MS syndicates, so you could drop one of them and replace with #Mojeek or #Gigablast (which do their own independent crawling).

     smallcircles (Humane Tech Now) repeated this.