I heard a lot of bad stuff about Brave and their CEO lately and am now unsure if the search engine is any good? Do they censor stuff? Is any data collected? Can it be considered private?
If you’d not recommend it, what are good alternatives and why? I was a long time duckduckgo user before, so anything similar to it or brave search would be great. I’m not into self hosting.
Yes, I’m familiar with SearXNG, but every time I tried searching for something complex on different instances, I would encounter the following error: “Sorry! we didn’t find any results. Please use another query or search in more categories.” I genuinely appreciate what they’re trying to accomplish with that project, but I’m not in a position to test something if it doesn’t demonstrate the same efficiency as a established product. Let’s say I can’t afford to be a beta tester right now.
To a lesser extent, I had a similar experience with Brave, as its results align more with what I expect from Google (and therefore, StartPage).
DuckDuckGo, when I tried using it as an alternative, never provided me with better results than what StartPage offered. I’d love for it to work for me, but I simply end up spending more time there than on other search engines.
A trick I’ve learned for when this happens with SearXNG is to add “!web” to the search query. It provides a wider range of search engines and images, which specific ones can be selected in the settings. Like all things software, it takes a bit to adjust to a new interface but SearXNG allows users to control a lot more of the functionality.