Hi everyone, so I hear that a lot of are lost in choosing a good search engine apart from the popular ones, but I think I have the solution
The search engine I’ve been using on all my devices is named “Qwant” its French and of course European. Its private and fast, I’ve been using it and didn’t had any issues with it.
So yes I am also new here on Lemmy and just wanted to be useful.
I don’t know if it’s accurate to describe Qwant as “private.” There is a bit to be desired with their privacy policy, such as them apparently sending your IP address to Microsoft
https://about.qwant.com/en/legal/confidentialite/
There’s also this bizarre section
If you have not consented or are not subject to the Services offered, we automatically collect technical data… Salted hash of the IP address…, market segment of a query, date and time of the visit, information about the country and chosen language…
Anonymized by Microsoft after 6 months.
if you think that qwant is private, qwant has some bad news for you ☞ https://about.qwant.com/en/legal/confidentialite/
they share your information with Microsoft even with “No consent”
this is not the first time i see these promotional qwant posts here. Either qwant is getting these posted or people who claim to care about privacy don’t read PRIVACY POLICY
to be fair, that only happens when you click on one of the ads, which i think is fair
anyone know what their plans are exactly in terms of switching away from bing?
also altough I smile everytime im not using google or bing directly anymore while getting these amazing results with that nice qwant UI:
it’s image search is my biggest complaint usecase wise. the results are small, non-scalable and theres no similar search upon focusing one result
anyone know what their plans are exactly in terms of switching away from bing?
They are working with Ecosia to build their own, shared search index, rather than be reliant on the corporate ones.
Thanks exactly what I was looking for. I wish they’d give more updates 😅
As I understand, it’s no small task to build or maintain a working search index. There’s a reason it’s mostly been huge, corporate entities that take on the challenge, and why smaller search providers tend to rely on preexisting ones.
So I applaud Qwant and Ecosia on their initiative, but also understand that it may take a while before it bears fruit.
SearXNG is the best of ALL worlds. You can get results from every search engines, there’s no ads, and it’s self-hostable
With a private searxng instance searches still come from your single IP so if you use ie; google, bing, etc… You’re still being tracked heavily.
Unless you use a public instance where your searches are ‘lost in the noise’. But then most of the search engines will block it so it doesn’t work very well in my experience.
I’m of two minds of this. On one hand, like you said, all your searches will still track back to your IP address.
But on the other hand, if it’s a pseudonymous IP address, you might end up giving out less information then if you contacted the search instances directly. You don’t have to worry about scraping away cookies or using a specific browser or always being connected to a VPN. In essence, the self-hosted instance is your “VPN” for searches.
It would be nice if you could get your friends to also use your instance, but if not, I think a self-hosted instance for a party of one is not a meaningless venture.
from youtube video “De-Google Your Life”
Ecosia has it’s own index with qwant so this is not entirely correct
I’ve been using Qwant for about a month now on Vivaldi. I’m happy and see no reason to go back to Google full time. What I do miss from Google though is things like showing business opening times when searching
Yea I am also using Vivaldi too and I really like the freedom of customizations and its also European which is a huge plus and its privacy focused. I think Qwant and Vivaldi makes a great internet browsing experience in my opinion.