6mo ago

How private is the Presearch search engine?

I've been trying to find a good privacy respecting browser, but I can't really decide on what to use. I don't like the search results with Brave Search. DuckDuckGo shares my information with Microsoft and SearchXNG shows me NSFW images even with strict search on. I really like Presearch, but I'm not really sure what they're about.

EDIT: After tinkering with the settings of my SearXNG instance, it seems to have reduced the amount of NSFW images. I think I will stick with SearXNG for now.

55 comments

The best is to self host your own SearXNG metasearch engine.
- Does that not defeat the point, because then they can see that the searches are coming from your location/internet?
  
  I host my searxng instance on a hetzner vps so my ip is not leaked anywhere.
  
  You can host if on a vps, use it behind a vpn, or make a whole group of people using it so you don't know from who these requests were
- This
What does DDG share with Microsoft?
- It's probably not that big of a deal, but I just don't want anything to do with Microsoft.
  
  So they only share when you click on an ad. I use an adblocker anyway, so effectively they're not sharing anything. Or do I misunderstand?
  
  I trust a search engine if I can turn JS off and still get results.
  I just use Duckduckgo Lite with Ublock Origin, NoScript, LocalCDN, Libredirect, and Chameleon extensions on hardened Firefox fork.
  A self hosted Searxng would also be a good option though.
  
  You can disable the ads in settings
It seemed extremely sketchy to me, most results were from other engines and it was embracing some weird crypto.
Have you considered StartPage ?
It returns google results whilst stripping of all google tracking and does not track itself either.
- There's some concern now that Startpage is majority owned by an ad company. The company says they want the ad revenue rather than the user data, but it's hard to trust that. I used to use it but moved to Searxng.
  
  I tried Searxng but it just wasnt giving good results at all. And lacked far too many features of a modern search engine imo.
  The thing is you kinda have to trust the word of all companies with how they collect your data and how they monetise themselves. I still think startpage is one of the best alternatives for privacy. Also my adblockers seem to work fine on startpage's ad links so i dont see them.
- Startpage seems like a pretty good alternative. I read their privacy policy and it looks pretty solid.
  
  whoogle is also similar
Not sure about the privacy of Presearch but their results are really good. A few times already I was searching for something I know existed out there and only Presearch was able to find it.
How can you make SearXNG work without problems? I've tried only one instance (not enough time) but searching for the game "Borderlands 2" (so nothing unknown) it randomly gives me
Sorry!
No results were found. You can try to:
Refresh the page.
Search for another query or select another category (above).
Change the search engine used in the preferences: /preferences
Switch to another instance: https://searx.space/
Default settings
Changing go something else and back to "General" sometimes it work
- I use these instances: https://search.inetol.net/ https://search.hbubli.cc/ It's working great so far. The only issue im having is that it pulls Chinese results every once in a while.
  
  Then go into your preferences and change that. The settings you want are saved to a cookie on your device, so you can change the settings even if it’s not your instance.
  Deselect any Chinese search engines and save.
  
  It was doing that for me so often that it became unusable for me.
  
  I'll host my own instance, I just wanted to know and see if it was a common issue or not
You can combine search engine of choice with anonymity provided by TOR browser.
I can only say good things about kagi. They let you adjust your search results according to how much you trust a given source, and the business model makes sense. You pay them, they give you a service. Heck, if you pay for unlimited searches, they have an actual incentive to make you search less and make you find results quickly
- Kagi uses russian Yandex and pretend it is neutral "business as usual":
  https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo
  
  Depending on what you’re searching for, Yandex might be the better option though. For example, things relating to piracy are probably going to be easier to find on Yandex than Google, because corporations file billions of DMCA notices every year. It’s one of the reason I use SearXNG, so I know I’m not getting the corporate sanitized version of the web.
- Another $10 subscription just to browse the web.. I don't think it's for me.
  
  My issue is not payment itself, but rather tying all my searches to a single identity. While it seems like they resolved the issue of only accepting KYC (although the only crypto accepted is Bitcoin, which has bigger fees than Monero as well as privacy issues, and to my understanding, Lightning is harder to self-custody), the absolute linkability remains.
  
  You pay with money or privacy, but pay you must. 😉
Did you try PriEco ?

55 comments