Search Engines - which one to choose?
Search Engines - which one to choose?
- Introduction - - The
problem with no own index
- - List of providers
- - SearX
- - Brave Search
- - Wiby
- - Swisscows
- - StartPage
- - DuckDuckGo
- - Qwant
- - MetaGer
- - Jive Search (DEAD)
- - Mojeek
- - Ecosia
- - Oscobo
- - Discrete Search
- - Gibiru
- - Gigablast
- - Peekier
- - Presearch
- - Right
Dao - 4get
- - Freespoke
- - FindX
- - Stract
- - Marginalia
- - You
- - WebCrawler
- - Search my Site
- - MillionShort
- - Spyda
- - Excite
- - 4Conservative
- - GoodGopher
- - Summary
- - Lyrics search
engines -
Introduction
Most of us will use these every day (usually several times, in fact), so it's
important to carefully consider your selection of choices. Not only do we want
great results, but - since we will often share some really sensitive data with
them (such as medical, travel, or even that we're interested in loli or
shoplifting) - they better not be doing dirty stuff with it. There are also
various additional functions that we'd like our search engines to provide. Now
why did I use the phrase selection of choices? Because - as you will see -
the situation with search engines is not as good as with E-mail providers, so
we're forced to switch around since there isn't a single one that has everything
we need. Without further ado, let us check what is available:
The problem with no own index
A while after finishing this article I've had a "revelation" - the situation
with search engines is even worse than I thought before. Aside from Wiby (which
has very few searchable sites in it) and Mojeek, the search engines mentioned
here depend on others for their results. By "others" I mean either Google,
Bing or Yahoo - three massive privacy violators. When you search through,
say, Swisscows - the query is first sent to Swisscows, which forwards it to
Bing, which then returns the result to Swisscows and finally to you. There are
several problems with such a setup:
1. Regardless of the engine's policy, the search terms are being stored on the
violators' servers, and those can contain sensitive information.
2. The engine needs to enter an agreement with the violator in order to proxy
their results, and the contents of that agreement are not revealed to you and
can include data collection. Unless they do it the Scroogle way...
(archive)
(MozArchive) (hint: it
died).
3. The results will still be censored if that is the violator's policy.
4. The engine can be blocked at any time by the violator.
This is not that different from using Invidious, Nitter, Facebook Container or
custom Discord clients for their respective services - the violator still calls
the shots. And we - like the wives dependent on their abusive husbands - keep
coming back for more in hopes we can prevent some of the damage. But - as we
rely more and more on the violators - it gets harder to dump them. Keep this in
mind while reading through the below recommendations.
List of providers
Searx icon [SearX](https://searx.space/) Searx icon
UPDATE June 2022: rewritten. SearX allows you to choose the search engines
used, and proxies your queries to them through itself. It has no own index so
all the issues from the relevant
section still apply.
Still probably the best option to use these days, if you find a good instance.
The level of support for different search engines can vary heavily. Bing, in
particular, doesn't seem to work anywhere, and all other options aside from
Mojeek (which will almost always block SearX) and Gigablast, censor. Yandex is
not able to be proxied by SearX, either. Still, most of the relevant search
engines are supported. So you might be wondering why use anything other than
SearX. Well, it's because this happens more often than not:
However, using SearX instead of the engines directly obviously provides superior
privacy, not giving the proxied engines your IP or loading their trackers.
Remember, though, that instances could still choose to collect data (read
privacy policies if they exist). The best option is to spread your searching
over several instances. SearX provides very useful Web Archive integration as
well, helping avoid Cloudflare. Onion domains are possible if the instance has
installed them. Searching itself works without JavaScript, even with images. NG
has seemingly improved the image results, as well. I recommend using one
instance for images and another for regular results; this allows adding both as
different shortcuts to the address bar, and without getting image results stuck
in between your regular ones.
Brave icon [Brave Search](https://search.brave.com) Brave icon
UPDATE: I don't want to call it "decent" anymore. Even though it apparently
(MozArchive), it clearly
deranks alternative content in favor of mainstream trash (results similar to
Google's), even if the latter is barely relevant to what you searched for.
That's in contrast to DuckDuckGo or Qwant, whose results are more in line with
what you've actually typed. Edit: I was too lenient. The censorship is
exactly like Google's - meaning you will never find the truth about the
moon landing or COVID vaccines there even if the query asks for exactly that.
What you will find - though - is a bunch of irrelevant "fact check" or
"science loving" sites, or ones shitting on "conspiracy theorists". I am now
doubting if they truly have their own index instead of lifting everything from
Google - unless they chose to index only the evil sites and ignore all the good
ones, which would be even worse. They lie about it, BTW:
No, Brave Search does not filter, downrank, or censor search results. Nor
will we change our search algorithm to increase or decrease the prominence
of results in response to current events or anyone’s political, religious,
ethical, or other beliefs. Brave Search—like Brave itself—is intended to be
a user-first portal to the web, free of Big Tech’s manipulation.
But everyone can easily verify the censorship for themselves, with a query such
as "9 / 11 was done by the government". And just with that, this brainwashing
facility pretending to be a search engine should be trashed. UPDATE June
2023: if you want proof, here are the first 6 results for Christchurch
shooting was faked - my favorite query for testing these kinds of things:
Five of them attack conspiracy theories, maybe worse than what even Google does.
And that's not everything that's bad about Brave. Though its privacy
policy (archive)
(MozArchive) seems to say
that the IP addresses are not stored:
You can search for ‘cafes near me' and Brave Search will use the IP address
broadcast by your device but without sharing that IP address and without
storing it. This means we can't tie your searches to you and your location.
It doesn't say literally anything else. We have to go to another
page
(MozArchive) to see just how
much stuff Brave stores:
- Number of daily/weekly/monthly visits
- Number of returning visits
- Number of search queries per day
- Average query length
- What percentage of queries led to a user clicking a search result
- How many users have chosen to leave feedback about Brave Search
- The operating systems people use when they visit (e.g. macOS, Windows,
etc)
- The browser you’ve visited from (e.g. Brave, Chrome, Safari, etc)
They say this is all opt-in - but in reality, not only is the tracking opt-out
(enabled by default) but you cannot even change it without JS and not at
all in Pale Moon. This means they lied in their privacy policy by
pretending that they will only collect the data if you allow them, which sounds
as if it requires actual user action to happen. As usual, cynicism wins over
hope. This should have been expected - it's still fucking Brave, and there
has been a lot of shady
shit going on with them.
How do we know they won't include some sponsored results or add referral links,
the way they did with their browser? How do we know they won't eventually
partner with a violator, like they did with Uphold? And that's the biggest flaw
of this search engine. Due to Brave's reputation taking several blows to the
chin already, we just can't trust it anymore. Image search does not work without
JS. UPDATE June 2022: Text queries used to work through TOR without JS, but
now they bring up this:
BS requires JS and WebAssembly enabled to search through TOR, enforcing the
usage of bloated browsers. See? I told you to not be hopeful. Trash it and don't
look back. UPDATE: there is now an onion, so I guess they do not hate TOR
now at least on the onion.
Swisscows icon [Swisscows](https://swisscows.com/) Swisscows icon
UPDATE: it's worse than I thought - keep reading! If we only took into
account the privacy policies (archive)
(MozArchive), this little
known search engine from the Swiss Alps would rank very highly indeed:
We do not collect any of our visitors’ personal information. None
whatsoever. When using Swisscows neither your IP address is recorded nor is
the browser you are using (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Chrome, etc.)
collected. No analyses are made, which operating system our users use
(Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.); your search are not recorded either. We record
absolutely no data from our visitors. The only information we store is the
number of search requests entered daily at Swisscows, to measure the total
overall traffic on our website and to evaluate a breakdown of this traffic
by language and mere overall statistics.
No IP or browser data is stored! Swisscows even realizes (unlike, say,
DuckDuckGo) that saving the search queries is also dangerous, even if allegedly
disassociated from so-called personal information:
Furthermore, it is important not to store any search terms, given that these
can also contain personal data. (Just think about someone who enters their
own name and/or their insurance number into the search box.)
For a while I thought that - while they might not store anything themselves -
they might still share some data with Bing (which they use for their results) -
but my suspicions were defused:
Swisscows does not transmit any personal information to third party search
engines or to the providers of sponsored results.
All of this is according to their privacy policy only. However, we know
better than to believe a privacy policy blindly - especially when there are some
problems with the trustworthiness of Swisscows. First of all, they require
JavaScript to display the page at all - which is a terrible design; worse yet
the code is heavily obfuscated -
almost as if they were hiding something. I got a report of Swisscows including
redirect links in its results. At first I thought it's some mistake, but decided
to investigate and confirmed it. They look like this:
http://www.smartredirect.de/redir/clickGate.php?u=[UniqueUserId?]&m=12&p=[Ye
tAnotherID?]&q=[YourSearchQuery]&url=[TargetURL]&r=https%3A%2F%2Fswisscows.c
h%3Fquery%3D[YourQuery]
Shady as fuck and contrary to their privacy policy of not sending your data
anywhere - because that redirect service will absolutely get your browsing
history with what seems to be an user ID (unconfirmed yet) attached to it; as
well as the search engine you used (in this case, Swisscows - but who knows what
other partners in crime they have). According to this stat
site (archive)
(MozArchive), Smart Redirect
seems to collect the browsing history of almost 20K different people every
day - a pretty significant violator, then. What this service actually does is
show sponsored results that are indistinguishable from the regular ones
aside from a little image next to them (for which Swisscows makes another
third-party request). If you click on those links, your browser will make a
request to an affiliate marketing company such as awin or linksynergy - which
also seem to contain unique user IDs. Sometimes, searches from the Tor
network will be denied - this might depend on which exit node you get.
Regardless, they lied about not sending your data to third parties - safe to
say, then, that the myth of the little private Swiss Cow is dead and buried.
But let's dig a little deeper:
The only legitimate reason for our beginning to collect personal data would
be the existence of a legal warrant or a court order, which would require us
to do so in connection with a specific user, who is suspected of such a
serious crime that such a violation of his or her privacy would be
justified.
So they will perform targeted surveillance without notifying you when the
government comes knocking (that's the great Swiss Privacy Law in action). The
search engine also has this "family-friendly" shtick, which means you might get
a message such as:
Dear user, the entered word is not allowed for under 18 year olds, since we
have decided on the protection of minors, the word "insert search term" is
excluded from the search. Thank you very much for your understanding!
This is activated by many porn-related queries and some violence-related ones
but you can still find really graphic stuff like people's limbs being cut off
pretty easily. And thankfully, information alone does not seem to be censored.
Swisscows also has a semantic map feature which displays additional terms
relevant to the search you've typed, narrowing the results to what you might be
looking for. I haven't found it very useful though, or maybe I just don't get
how to use it. The search engine does not run without JavaScript enabled at all
(can only see a white background - bad design!). XHR is also required to display
the actual results (which come from Bing exclusively). Used to not work in Pale
Moon but that seems to have been fixed recently (whether by them or by PM...).
Swisscows can search for images, videos, and news; it ~~also includes the only
(AFAIK) privacy-aware translator which is unfortunately also family-friendly
(cannot translate swear words...)~~ does not include the translator anymore, so
the one thing it was useful for is gone. Of course, the Swisscows Privacy Wall
came crashing down above; it's not a sure thing we can even trust its policy
when they've already broken it. So, Bing might be getting your data after all.
Having problems with Tor seals the deal even further. Another one bites the
dust, as they say!
StartPage icon [StartPage](https://startpage.com) StartPage icon
A privacy-based proxy for Google search. Claims to believe privacy is a
fundamental human right; let's see how much do they actually follow that belief:
Why we don’t collect any "personal data"
We saw the perils of that in DDG's section - where, for example, measuring
engagement of specific events on the page was considered non-personal, along
with the actual search queries. But let's give the benefit of doubt and see what
is StartPage's interpretation of the term:
We don’t record your IP address
With the most important potential roadblock out of the way, the privacy train is
running at full speed!
We don’t serve any tracking or identifying cookies
No hiccups so far.
We do measure overall traffic numbers and some other – strictly anonymous –
statistics. These stats may include the number of times our service is
accessed by a certain operating system, a type of browser, a language, etc.
The privacy train is slowing down. I spoke of the problems with so-called
anonymous data in DDG's section. Remember: the only anonymous data is no data.
But it gets worse. StartPage includes advertisements from Google (these cannot
be removed by uMatrix, only element hiding) on top of their search results page,
and:
In order to enable the prevention of click fraud, some non-identifying
system information is shared
Aaand the privacy train has been totally derailed! Now you have to trust
StartPage's determination of what is non-identifying enough to be safe in
Google's hands. Now they don't say exactly what that data consists of - but if
it's the same set mentioned above that StartPage uses for their statistics, it
would definitely leave the possibility of revealing someone thanks to browser
fingerprinting. So StartPage sends potentially identifying data to Google. It's
not all that bad though - at least they apparently don't store it themselves.
And then there's this:
Any request will have to come from Dutch judicial authorities. We’ll only
comply if we’re legally obliged to do so. But we’re not likely to receive
requests by governments to hand over user data – simply because we don’t
have any.
And:
We will never comply with any voluntary surveillance program
So it seems that, at least - you're pretty safe from the government's prying
eyes. The other issue with StartPage are the absolutely terrible search
results. That is because Google runs a massive censorship campaign (archive)
(MozArchive), deranking any
alternative or conspiratorial content. This means you will even get results that
don't relate to your query at all - and I've confirmed it with tests. Try
searching for something like "was the Christchurch shooting faked" and you will
see what I mean. Then compare with Qwant or DDG. I did this for many other
queries which would result in displaying alternative or conspiratorial websites
(if the search engine was honest, that is), but instead showed me irrelevant
trash. Also, just like Google, it supports no other ways to search aside from
Web and Images. StartPage works perfectly with JavaScript disabled and has the
handy Anonymous View feature, allowing you to visit returned sites without
revealing yourself to them (however, much functionality will be disabled).
Interestingly, a long time ago StartPage used to run a search engine called
IxQuick that used their own index. I used that extensively when it was around
and the results were pretty good AFAIK. Why did they take it down and submitted
completely to the Google botnet? We could have had an actual privacy-based
search engine with no dependency on the tech giants and no censorship (since
StartPage doesn't seem to believe in it, unlike Qwant). But with the situation
as is, I cannot recommend StartPage at all due to the censored results and
sharing your system data with Google. Use only for emergencies when you
really need Google's huge web index. UPDATE: actually, fuck that.
StartPage just literally got bought by an advertising
company (archive)
the acquisition. UPDATE November 2020: now they became totally
authoritarian, hating TOR, VPNs and even private browsers:
This reminds me of malicious Cloudflare browser checks, where they compare your
setup to what they consider "safe" to decide whether to let you through. I found
this out in November, but it's probably been around since earlier. To be
honest, I've always felt something was off about these guys; their image was
"too clean" if you know what I mean. Now we have proof that for them, privacy
has only served as a useful slogan; they never actually gave a shit about it.
Therefore, I can honestly advise to avoid these frauds completely now!
UPDATE March 2022: Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, so let me make a stronger
statement. StartPage's (Google's) censorship is absolutely disgusting. You
will find nothing but what your malicious rulers want you to find. No flat
earth material, no COVID skepticism, no analyses of staged events like the
so-called US capitol riot. StartPage will ignore your search query if it
would result in unapproved opinions, it is nothing but a drip of propaganda.
If you like being a slave, sure, keep using StartPage. But I'm a free man, and
I throw mind controllers like StartPage into the trash!
Wiby icon [Wiby.me](https://wiby.me/) Wiby icon
An interesting new search engine dedicated to lean, personal, old-school
websites. Really recommend keeping an eye on that one - and you can literally
support the creation of a better Internet by submitting websites to it (if you
know a good one, you should really do that). No big corpos allowed here!
Does not require JavaScript (actually, there is not a single script on its
(MozArchive), though.
DuckDuckGo icon [DuckDuckGo](https://duckduckgo.com) DuckDuckGo icon
The search engine that doesn't track you! Or at least, that is what it claims.
The marketing is slick and I must admit I fell for it initially and was a fan
for a long time - but to be honest, there were always red flags. DuckDuckGo
hosts a privacy site (archive) with some great guides.
(MozArchive) and went after
giants like Google (
archive)
(MozArchive) - always a
plus in my mind and a huge reason to consider a provider trustworthy. Their
Twitter account posts privacy stuff all the time, etc. At a glance, DDG appears
as just a group of people like you and me, looking to protect their privacy and
creating a service to do so (unlike Mozilla's in-your-face manipulation).
Unfortunately, like the great magicians they are, they've made a really
convincing illusion - but still an illusion; and I will show just how.
As I said, the red flags were always there. Gabriel Weinberg - the DuckDuckGo
founder - used to run the Names Database
(MozArchive), a social
network allowing you to reconnect with your old friends from school. However,
the most important feature - sending messages - was locked behind a paywall
which could be bypassed if you invited 24 people to the network. They
claimed that you could remove yourself from the database if you wanted to:
We enable people to remove themselves from The Names Database at any time,
which instantly and automatically deletes any personal information
associated with the profile removed from The Names Database.
(e) The Terms may be modified only by Company posting changes to the Terms
on Website. Each time User accesses Website, User will be deemed to have
accepted any such changes in effect at the time of access.
Just by visiting the website you've accepted all its terms (what if they've
included a line "we can kill you in your sleep") while you weren't looking?
Haha.
(a) Company owns all information submitted to it, regardless of who or what
submits it, what is submitted, or how or why it is submitted. Such
information includes but is not limited to any and all information submitted
by User or about User and any User Information submitted during membership
or through the normal use of Website and the services available through it.
(b) Any successors or assignees of Company will by default acquire for their
own use, in accordance with the Terms, all information collected by
Company, including but not limited to all information associated with
Website as specified in section 2(a) above.
So everything you submitted there ceased to become yours (or even if someone
else posted your personal info), and could have been transferred to any other
company. Later versions of the agreement
(MozArchive) contained even
more egregious stuff such as:
Opobox reserves the right (but not the obligation) to remove or edit Your
Information
you may NOT [...] (e) "meta-search" any Opobox Web Site; (f) forge
headers or otherwise manipulate identifiers when communicating in any way
with the Opobox Web sites [...] (j) use data mining or any data
gathering or extraction tools; (k) copy, reproduce, modify, create
derivative works from, distribute or publicly display any content (except
for Your Information) from the Opobox Web Sites;
So I can't change my user agent; use wget, httrack or curl; or even take a
screenshot of the site. Funny shit. And this is all stuff that the later DDG
founder agreed to. Then he sold the database to another company, Classmates.co
m (archive)
(MozArchive), which added
this to the agreement:
By registering on the Opobox Web Sites, as an added benefit you will also be
automatically registered on Classmates.com, which is owned and operated by
Classmates Online, Inc. ("Classmates"), Opobox's parent corporation. To
complete this registration on Classmates.com, you consent to have Your
Information provided to Classmates by Opobox. Classmates services are
provided pursuant to its own Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
So the privacy guru that later founded DuckDuckGo sold all your data to an
even more unethical company (ar
chive)
(MozArchive). Did he have a
sudden change of heart and created the uber-privacy-respecting DDG? Let's check
it out:
DuckDuckGo used to claim in its privacy policy that no cookies are used by
default, but some years ago it turned out they were setting a cookie from a
third party (MozArchive),
contrary to their policy. It was only on their help page and they fixed it quite
fast. So is that all I've got? A cookie from ages ago?
In their Privacy Policy (archive)
(MozArchive) they proudly
proclaim - in big letters - that they don't collect or share personal
information. The big question here, of course, is what is meant by personal
information. It turns out that, for DuckDuckGo at least, search queries alone
are not personal - even if you search for something only you could know. I'm
pretty sure most people would disagree with that. DuckDuckGo claims that it is
fine if you don't store the user agent or IP address along with the search,
though:
We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as
we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings. We use aggregate,
non-personal search data to improve things like misspellings.
What this non-personal search data consists of, is of course not stated. Is it
really only the search queries DDG saves? We do know that, for example,
DuckDuckGo tracks Pale Moon usage through a parameter in the search query
(?t=palemoon), which is there by default. This also likely happens for their
Is that not already personal? Could it not be used to link your searches? The
funny thing is, DuckDuckGo has spent much of their privacy policy criticizing
Amazon for leaking their search queries (archive)
(MozArchive), which were
able to be linked to single users because they fucked up their anonymization.
Can you ensure this also couldn't be done for DuckDuckGo's saved searches? After
all they do track other information as I've shown earlier. As DDG itself
says (archive)
(MozArchive), The only
truly anonymized data is no data - so why not just not store the search
queries? From the techcrunch article:
The most serious problem is the fact that many people often search on their
own name, or those of their friends and family, to see what information is
available about them on the net. Combine these ego searches with porn
queries and you have a serious embarrassment. Combine them with “buy
ecstasy” and you have evidence of a crime. Combine it with an address,
social security number, etc., and you have an identity theft waiting to
happen. The possibilities are endless.
How long does DDG store the search queries? That is not explained! They do admit
they will comply with court ordered legal requests. What could law enforcement
do if they came across queries that only I could have searched for? Could
those be used against me? No idea but I'd much rather not have that happen!
Then, DuckDuckGo admits to running experiments on their
users (archive)
First, you might notice that when you search DuckDuckGo, there may be an
"&atb=" URL parameter in the web address at the top of your browser. This
parameter allows us to anonymously A/B (split) test product changes we make
to DuckDuckGo.
Second, we measure engagement of specific events on the page (e.g. when a
misspelling message is displayed, and when it is clicked). This allows us to
run experiments where we can test different misspelling messages and use
CTR (click through rate) to determine the message's efficacy.
For example, our browser extensions and mobile apps will send an atb.js
request with each search made. These requests allow us to count
approximately how many devices accessed DuckDuckGo
That's quite a lot of information, and right after criticizing so-called
anonymous data collection! This is exactly what I've criticized Mozilla for
doing and in fact what prompted me to rewrite this whole section (and article).
Gabriel Weinberg has shown himself to be hypocritical and broke trust on
many occasions. For a recent one, he has put his shirt selling
service behind Cloudflare (a MITM)
without notifying the buyer in any way. So what's the final verdict on DDG?
There's no IP storage nor most of the other data search providers usually
collect. Third party requests are not made. There is a JS-free version
(results don't go beyond first page) and they do host a Tor hidden
service
(which blocks non-TBB browsers - tested with Iridium). For the non-privacy
relevant stuff: the search results are really fucking good; Bing and Yahoo are
used for them, as well as their own crawler. More than that - DDG displays
"instant answers" from over than 400 different sources in the top right corner
of the window. Has ads that can be disabled in the settings. In addition to
regular sites, DDG can search for images, videos (YouTube results only) as well
as news. However, digging deeper shows several serious issues with the founder's
lack of reliability and trustworthiness. He clearly does not truly care about
you or your privacy - as the recent Cloudflare inclusion shows. Being the
great businessman that he is, he has pretended very effectively that he does and
took great advantage of the recent privacy scares. So, if you care only about
pure privacy / functionality, DDG is pretty good still - but due to the shaky
ethical foundation and enough cracks if you look hard enough, I cannot
recommend it as enthusiastically as I did before. You could say it's the
Tutanota of search engines - good enough as an entry point, but you can do
better. There is nothing out there even approaching the level of RiseUp's email
service, though; so DuckDuckGo remains a viable option for regular usage still.
UPDATE September 28, 2021 Now blocks Indian IPs due to some IT Act 2000
(presumably a law). UPDATE March 2022: they now
censor
(MozArchive) Russian
disinformation. Fuck them.
UPDATE June 2022: DuckDuckGo now includes a misinformation detector:
Are they going to remind me to take my booster next? Earlier I have said DDG
belongs in high tier despite the privacy and historical issues. But with the
recent violations, CuckCuckGo belongs in the trash instead.
Qwant icon [Qwant](https://qwant.com/) Qwant icon
UPDATE September 2021: French search engine using its own index plus Bing.
As far as I can see, most of its flaws have been fixed. TOR and VPNs are
accepted now. The search results are not being "eaten" anymore. JavaScript-free
for all the categories, with a better interface than SearX. The side options
have also been improved, with more sources for videos (Dailymotion in addition
to YouTube) and news (but the social media and music categories have been
deleted). Qwant Lite has a massive flaw, though - namely that you can't copy
the link addresses since Qwant sends them all through some kind of local
redirect. This makes it annoying when you just want to link something in an
article instead of going there yourself.
However, the privacy policy has been
revised
(MozArchive), and it's
become worse. I suspect they are simply revealing what was the case all along.
Anyway, let me analyze the updated privacy policy:
Qwant stores your search queries for 12 months, and for the first 7 days
connects them to an unique identifier:
Qwant retains for 7 days the keyword(s) entered associated with a pseudonym
identifier calculated from the User Agent of your browser and the salted
hash of your IP address. After this period, the keywords are no longer
associated to an identifier and are retained for 12 months for aggregate
statistical analysis
Microsoft (this partner) gets your full IP and stores it for 18 months:
Qwant may also collect and transfer to this partner your full IP address.
This data is transferred to this partner within the European Union, and may
be retained in accordance with Bing’s Privacy Policy for a maximum period of
18 months.
Qwant, also, collects pretty much everything in order to evaluate its audience:
- – The source of the user’s visit to the site (the HTTP referrer and the
search field used to trigger the request);
- – Information about the type of link clicked (for example the position of
the clicked link in the results with the number of results proposed);
- – Some information deduced from your User Agent (type of browser,
operating system, major version of the browser,…)
I can't say I'm very impressed with their privacy policy, regardless of their
front page posturing. Especially the Microsoft partnership is worrying. Anyway,
let's check out their ToS
In the event that you notice content that may relate to apologies for crimes
against humanity, provocation to or apologies for acts of terrorism,
incitement to racial hatred, towards people on the basis of their sex, their
sexual orientation or identity or handicap, child pornography, incitement
to violence, attacks on human dignity, when browsing the Services, you have
the option to let us know by contacting us at the address legal@qwant.com
(also available at our FAQ).
All I need to know is here. Qwant accepts the removal of entries that violate
their favorite victimhood issues. Wouldn't be surprised if they are also covid
cucks who will remove alternative information about it.
What is the verdict, then? Privacy policy isn't that great anymore (Microsoft is
getting your shit), but otherwise it's fine. The censorship is worrying but I
haven't heard a practical case of it. UPDATE September 28, 2021: they now
block Indian IPs since about a week ago. Gave a
(MozArchive) when asked
about it:
Hello, this is a difficult decision, but we have decided to close access to
our services in some countries where we feel we cannot provide the expected
quality of service. We apologise for this. Best regards.
UPDATE March 2022: another bunch of cucks that censor
so-called
(MozArchive) war propaganda
(but only if it comes from Russia). Fuck them too.
MetaGer icon [MetaGer](https://metager.org) MetaGer icon
UPDATE September 2024: now
paid-only. Probably going to die
altogether soon:
The reason is that Yahoo terminated our contracts unilaterally and without
any notice on Monday. Upon request, we were merely informed that Yahoo would
no longer be operating the business in Germany. For us as the operator of
MetaGer, this means on the one hand that we no longer receive any
advertising revenue, which has been used to pay for office space, servers
and employees. On the other hand, we will also no longer be able to deliver
our search results as part of the ad-financed search. Only with Yahoo did we
have a central deal to receive search results in return for advertising.
This no longer applies.
This reveals to us two important issues. First of all, any search engine without
its own index is a slave to its parent provider. And when he pulls the plug, it
might scream and cry, but it will die. As happened here, the upstream violator
won't even bother to tell you you're getting murdered.
Second, all big search engines depend on being able to fill your mind with
clutter / trash / bullshit or as they are colloquially called, "advertisements".
Which often (like here) also comes along with additional tracking, or
inconveniences such as not being able to copy a link. And when the ad-spam money
dries up (like here), they just helplessly die. It's time to think about how
our everyday usage of the internet is held up by something that brings massive
ethical
problems
and can snap anytime. We should only be using search engines that have ethics
built in; one ad-spam and we're out! Anyway, here's the old review that is now
completely irrelevant:
This one from Germany also advertises itself as private, but it not only
(MozArchive)...
For this purpose alone, we store the full IP address and a timestamp for a
maximum of 96 hours
...but also shares a part of it with advertisers:
To receive this advertising, we give the first two blocks of the IP in
connection with parts of the so-called user agent to our advertising
partners.
Then, their website collects and stores the following data for up to one week:
Your IP-Address, Name and URL of the retrieved file, Date and time of
access, The referrer you sent, The user agent you sent
So, as we can see, MetaGer is not so great for privacy (Edit: but it's not
so bad either. At least we get the duration - which most services don't bother
to give - and it's not long). A later section says this:
When using the MetaGer plugin, the following data is generated:
IP-Adress: Will not be stored or shared.
User-Agent: Will not be stored or shared.
It would be easy to assume that searching through the MetaGer plugin (unlike
their site) stores no logs, but that would be naive and wrong. In fact, the
first sentence of the Accumulating data by context section disconfirms this
interpretation:
When using our web search engine MetaGer via their web form or through their
OpenSearch interface, the following data is generated:
And then comes the stuff about IP storage and everything. So, all the above
means is that the plugin usage stores no additional data over what the site
itself already does. So, MetaGer's privacy is not that good, but at least you
do get a maps service that stores no logs:
When using the MetaGer map service, the following data is generated:
IP-Adress: Will not be stored or shared.
User-Agent: Will not be stored or shared.
Search query: Will not be stored or shared.
Location data: Will not be stored or shared.
UPDATE March 2022: I don't know why I ever said the search results aren't
that great, because they are. I recommend using either the
onion
or the German mirror, as they include Yandex in their
searchable index. This will find you some results the English version won't,
though the onion will throw you a captcha sometimes. There is a great Open
Anonymously feature, which means you can view the sites through MetaGer, instead
of going to them directly (this is the same as StartPage's Anonymous View).
MetaGer, also, has pretty good image results - which work with JS disabled, as
everything else other than the maps. The privacy policy isn't great, but at
least it's concise and contains no unnecessary posturing, which is commendable,
I guess. You can change the language used for the results in the hamburger menu
at the top, last option.
UPDATE August 2023: MetaGer, instead of just the Bing ads at the top, now
also serves a bunch of "partner" results mixed in with the others (no idea when
they've implemented it, but seems pretty recent). When you click them, you are
taken to the destination only through an intermediary site tatrck, which is
Cloudflared - so for TOR users, or users of unconventional browsers etc. those
results will be unavailable. You also can't copy a "partner" search result and
share it with someone without that intermediary getting in the way. This makes
MetaGer now unsuitable for its main purpose, that is actually finding
information and being able to read it. We won't even get into the data
collection done by tatrck itself; it being Cloudflared indicts it enough. Edit:
way, way too many sites are partners, which also disables the Open anonymously
functionality for them, that I was hoping to use for some CFed sites. I think
MetaGer just killed itself.
[Jive Search (DEAD)](https://jivesearch.com)
Another one with seemingly zero logging - we don't store your search terms, ip
address nor information about your browser. - and even has a Tor
domain.
Supports searching only for regular sites (results sourced from Yandex - very
high quality according to my short testing) and images (on the other hand, these
suck). Provides Instant Answers similar to DDG and SearX, as well as proxy
links (with JS stripped out to prevent tracking and deanonymization). As with
Ecosia, MetaGer and StartPage - relying on a single source for the results,
regardless of its quality, is subject to eventual bias and censorship. That, as
well as absolutely zero customizability (can't change the basic, ugly default
theme, or even turn off autocomplete) means it's probably worse than DDG. Edit:
bumping it down since the amount of results is being cut off for some reason.
Apparently the engine itself contains much more
functionality - but the actual
instance sucks, and that is what I'm rating.
Mojeek icon [Mojeek](https://www.mojeek.com/) Mojeek icon
I'm just going to rewrite this. In an age of
(MozArchive), Mojeek is
significant because it is focused on unbiased search results (archive)
Mojeek doesn't have an agenda, and neither does it support any particular
view, whether that's in regard to politics or if blue is a nicer colour than
green. And that's the way we believe search engines should be. Our task is
to provide you with relevant search results, not to force a point of view on
you, or hide ones we don't agree with.
As far as I know, no other search engine makes this commitment. Mojeek can
do so because it is using their own index, instead of relying on the censoring
violators. Though the results are not as good in terms of e.g scientific or
technical queries, they're a lot better than I remember them being a few years
ago. And - in an age of mind control - a hard stance against censorship is more
important than slightly weaker results. JavaScript is not required at all,
even for images. What about their
privacy (archive)
(MozArchive)? They don't
store IPs:
IP addresses are not recorded, instead the IP address is replaced with a
simple two letter code indicating the visitors country of origin.
There is also no third party sharing:
The remaining log data (country, time/date, page requested, referral data,
and in a separate log browser data), which although now contains no
identifiable data, would still in no situation whatsoever be sold or
distributed to any third party vendors
This is better than what almost everyone else is doing. Please remember that any
search engine proxy (such as StartPage or SearX) has to by definition send the
requests to the search engine it is proxying. This means a violator gets at
least your query, and probably browser data and the other stuff. Mojeek can
avoid this due to using their own index, and keep the data only for themselves.
It does store logs though (the ones given above) and the duration of data
storage is not stated. Still, finally we have an independent, non-censoring
search engine that at least somewhat cares about your privacy. Unfortunately,
Mojeek is pretty useless for non-English results.
Ecosia icon [Ecosia](https://ecosia.org) Ecosia icon
UPDATE June 2021: now Cloudflared, and therefore useless. Their claim to
fame has been planting trees for every 45 searches (that's an average) you make
using their service - but this, of course, relies on Bing ads being displayed
(and I doubt it can counter the rampant deforestation, anyway). It's not very private by
default - For example, when you do a search on Ecosia we forward the following
information to our partner, Bing: IP address, user agent string, search term,
and some settings like your country and language setting. However, it claims to
respect the DNT header: If you have "Do Not Track" enabled in your browser
settings we do not collect any analytics data. Most other websites ignore this
setting - we think users should have a choice. Is the IP address apart of
analytics data? Depending on how literally the DNT information is interpreted,
~~Ecosia can become a pretty good choice, combining ethics and privacy~~ (okay,
this clearly isn't relevant now after Ecosia became Cuckflared). You can
search for regular sites, Images, Videos, News and Maps. However, the search
results are sourced exclusively from Bing. Will work without JavaScript but the
images will not be displayed at all.
Oscobo icon [Oscobo](https://oscobo.com) Oscobo icon
UPDATE September 2022: can almost never get this to search anymore. An
allegedly private one with a not-so-good privacy policy (last updated 2 years
ago...). It proudly proclaims several times how it doesn't store information in
a way that can identify you (can you be any more vague), however the myth that
this is a privacy-respecting practice has been
busted (archive)
(MozArchive). And they
don't actually say what they DO store and for how long - an indirect admission
that they do store quite a bit of data indeed. Then comes this gem: Oscobo uses
cookies to determine the effectiveness of our own marketing campaigns. And the
funniest thing is I don't see any cookies being set in my uMatrix (outdated
privacy policy, as mentioned before; however, it does show they did that at one
point, or at least planned to do so). Then it says: Oscobo uses proprietary
technology to hide you search history from others who may use your device after
you search. This may save you from some embarrassing situations But I see the
search queries in my browsing history, plain as a day - so this claim was a
mistake too (and a negative one this time). Oscobo can search for images (flickr
only - almost useless), videos and maps (embedding google directly, yawn); it
doesn't require JavaScript but images won't show up then. Anyway, due to the
issues mentioned earlier, this search engine does not seem trustworthy at all,
and I don't recommend it. It has nothing over the more widely known ones and for
something even funnier, it contains a direct link to some shady "Oscobo
Browser" executable file. Haha - avoid.
Discrete Search icon [Discrete Search](https://discretesearch.com) Discrete
Search icon
UPDATE March 2022: This trash doesn't work anymore in Pale Moon or
Librewolf. I have no idea why I even checked it out, but there you go.
To work properly, this one needs all of cookies, JavaScript and XHR enabled.
Discrete Search does not track search history in any user identifiable way.
The big lie of so-called private search engines rears its ugly head again. The
reply is the same as to Oscobo - "user identifiable" is vague and often includes
a lot of information that can reveal you if put
together (archive)
(MozArchive). Why not just
mention what the fuck do you store and let us decide whether we're comfortable
with it? Graciously, Discrete Search DOES provide that information later (unlike
Oscobo):
Additionally, we store aggregated search data to improve product
performance, but never store IP addresses or unique user identifiers in
connection with such searches in order to ensure that none of the
information collected in connection with your searchactivity is personally
identifiable.
So aggregated search data is logged; the important part comes next though. If
you read between the lines, they admit that they do store your IP address as
well as unique user identifiers, just allegedly unconnected with search
queries. And that is what you call private? No thanks! Why rely on someone's
dubious "unconnecting" when they could just not store the data? And Discreet
Search does seem to store a lot of it, increasing the risk. Then there's this
You certify that you own all intellectual property rights in Your Content.
You hereby grant us, our affiliates, and our partners a worldwide,
irrevocable, royalty-free, nonexclusive, sub-licensable, license to use,
reproduce, create derivative works of, distribute, publicly perform,
publicly display, transfer, transmit, distribute, and publish Your Content
and subsequent versions of Your Content for the purposes of (i) pursuing our
business interests, (ii) distributing Your Content, either electronically
or via other media, to third parties seeking to download or otherwise
acquire it, and/or (iii) storing Your Content in a remote database
accessible by third parties. This license shall apply to the distribution
and the storage of Your Content in any form, medium, or technology now known
or later developed.
TL;DR everything you submit or transmit to the engine becomes theirs (not
just queries but stuff like the headers your browser sends), and they are going
to store it in unspecified third party databases. Ha ha. Discrete Search puts
fucking image ads on top of your searches - a practice I've never seen
anywhere else. At least they've fulfilled the promise of encrypting your
searches locally, unlike Oscobo (yeah I've checked). Still, avoid this
trainwreck.
Gibiru icon [Gibiru](https://gibiru.com/) Gibiru icon
Claims to be Protecting Your Privacy Since 2009 on its main page. If you read
their privacy policy, it all checks out - Gibiru stores no logs or cookies. Of
course, what they've neglected to mention is that they literally use Google
directly for their results (without proxying them, like StartPage does or
Scroogle used to). Gibiru will not work without enabling Google scripts, and so
all the data that it allegedly doesn't collect, Google will happily take
instead. Unfortunately - as you can see - search engines have their fair share
of frauds too. Avoid!
Gigablast icon [Gigablast](https://gigablast.com/) Gigablast icon
UPDATE May 2023: Dead! Ugh. RIP. Had a nice 23 year long run. Though it's not
necessarily over forever.
Independent search engine, ran since the year 2000. Gigablast's index is
surprisingly good, and it does not appear to censor (same as Mojeek).
However, it requires JavaScript to display results. Image search shows only
thumbnails alongside text, no "gallery" like everyone else does, so you will
need to use something else for images if you want that functionality. No third
party requests, good privacy policy,
preventing third party sharing of your data and deleting logs regularly - though
that is not elaborated on.
Peekier icon [Peekier](https://peekier.com) Peekier icon
UPDATE May 2023: now redirects to Kagi Search that's paid and seems
completely different, review maybe coming soon.
When I learned of Peekier after rating some less-than-stellar search engines, I
was delighted to finally find another one that respects the user. There is no IP
storage, no third party requests, no logging the data your browser sends (aside
from temporary search queries - same policy as DuckDuckGo). It also has the
handy feature of displaying the resulting website without visiting it - showing
you the relevant information in an efficient way. And then I see this:
Cloudflare, our caching provider, may use a single session cookie for
anti-DDOS measures.
Okay, so while YOU might not store anything, Cloudflare - hiding in the shadows
between you and me - will happily take it all. And this claim - then - becomes a
lie:
SSL/TLS is enforced throughout the website. No unencrypted information is
transmitted over the internet.
Because Cloudflare decrypts the request on their servers, it cannot be said
that the information is encrypted for its whole journey. Since Cloudflare might
(MozArchive), I cannot just
let this seemingly small point slide. Of course, Peekier also claims it does
not use cookies in any way to track you or store personally identifiable data,
but it does require a Cloudflare cookie to work (which is literally a tracking
cookie), as well as enabling JavaScript. And that, my friends, ruins a search
engine that could have topped the list.
Presearch icon [Presearch](https://presearch.com) Presearch icon
Some people have inquired about this, so I guess I have to write about it. I'm
so tired of these crypto scams, which is the entire reason to exist for
Presearch, it seems. You can earn their special crypto token in there by
searching. Though there are some serious
requirements (archive)
(MozArchive) to satisfy:
For Usage Rewards:
1,000 PRE must be earned in order to claim Usage Rewards
A maximum of 1,000 PRE may be claimed every 90 days
Presearch reserves the right to increase or decrease these thresholds at any
time
So, you cannot withdraw your funds until you earn at least 70 USD. The really
malicious part is that they can change that amount at any time; no problem to
start requiring 10 000 or a trillion PRE to withdraw; you cannot ever feel
confident that you will be actually able to do so. Many people on their
Twitter
(MozArchive) are
complaining that they can't withdraw their funds even a year later, so this has
all the hallmarks of a crypto scam. Presearch can also just steal the tokens
you've earned:
If a Member stakes PRE toward search staking and then is determined by our
fraud detection system to have generated invalid search or referral
activity, then their staked tokens may be forfeited and not recoverable.
To enable advertisers to have their ads displayed under certain keywords
that the advertisers ‘stake’ their tokens against
The biggest payer for a given keyword wins and gets their ads through to you:
Advertisers can stake their PRE to a keyword, and whichever advertiser
stakes the most tokens will have its ads displayed when a user searches on
the term selected.
To participate, they will have to buy at least 70 USD worth of the PRE token,
for which Presearch charges 10%
markup (archive) and
that they can of course steal at any time. This is funny too (as if they
couldn't make it anymore obvious what they're doing):
If paying by credit card, a 7 month hold on ability to withdraw tokens to
the blockchain may be applied to protect against charge backs
You can also host a node, and if you pay 4000
PRE (archive)
(MozArchive) (280 USD;
who's going to spend that much on this scam?!), you will also get rewarded for
it:
In order to incentivize node operators who commit to providing consistent,
stable and responsive computing resources, we are paying Presearch PRE
tokens as rewards for node operators who stake a minimum of 4,000 PRE tokens
on their node.
This software is currently not open source and you are relying on our
assurances that nothing malicious is happening underneath the hood. We
promise that this is true, but the ability to verify it for yourself would
currently be limited to packet sniffers and any other means that you have
available to you. It is our intention to open source this software in the
future, but we’re not there yet.
required to cover your spendings:
Though the amount paid is variable, we are also ensuring that any node
operator who successfully served at least one query receives a minimum of
100 PRE, with numbers increase from there up to about 70x that amount for
the most active node operators.
Signing up for an account requires solving malicious hCaptcha, which I obviously
didn't bother to do so I don't know what information is required to give
otherwise. You don't need to care about this if you only want to use the engine
though - but then, why bother? It's not too good and the results are heavily
censored for queries like Moon landing was fake; Presearch does not have its
own index (archive)
The next step is to begin layering our own index on top of this platform so
that community-driven results can supersede the external results
(MozArchive) a number of
the world’s top search engines and other data sources, like everyone else. So
the claims of it being decentralized are fake, too. Using Presearch requires
JavaScript and cookies to be enabled. Lots of data is
collected (archive)
- Any information you provide through your profile (name, nickname, avatar,
etc.)
- Your email address
- Your password (one-way encrypted)
- Any information provided when making a purchase
- Account referrals
- The search engine providers you select
- Search events (when a search was conducted, how many tokens were earned,
and which provider was used)
- Your IP Address
- Your blockchain wallet address if you submit or connect it to your account
or use it for a deposit or withdrawal.
It is also all shared with shady Business partners that are not specified:
Partners. We may share transient information with trusted partners during a
particular request, for purposes of providing the Service. This may include
trusted advertising providers who contractually agree to delete the
information after the request is completed so that it is not stored.
When Presearch finally decides to fuck off, they will give their buyer all the
data they've collected:
Business Transfers. We may share personal information when we do a business
deal, or negotiate a business deal, involving the sale or transfer of all or
a part of our business or assets. These deals can include any merger,
financing, acquisition, or bankruptcy transaction or proceeding.
As was obvious all along, Presearch is a crypto scam pretending to be a search
engine. Its existence is based entirely on advertisers buying their way in (with
a 10% cut for Presearch) to shove ads down your throat, and then Presearch
doing everything to prevent the exchange of their tokens to a cryptocurrency
that is actually useful. But of course people got lured in by promises of easy
money and revolutionizing searching through blockchain technology. Trash it and
don't look back.
UPDATE August 2024: I got notified that this section was linked in the
(MozArchive) and saw that
the admin apparently replied to it. So let's see what he has had to say:
I don't know where you got that article from but that's not from Presearch,
For security reasons it is better that you do not open it
Don't you dare look behind the curtain.
What that article says is incorrect, Presearch pays for the pre As long as
you have used the search engine correctly
Were the Twitter reports fake then? Or maybe they all have simply not used the
search engine correctly?
There is nothing arbitrary and the terms and conditions are clear,
Is this not arbitrary? 1,000 PRE must be earned in order to claim Usage Rewards
[...] Presearch reserves the right to increase or decrease these thresholds
at any time. Yes, the "get out of jail free" clause is still there 2 years later
and it alone exposes Presearch as a total scam. Because you can never be sure
of the ability to withdraw your tokens. And the ToS is indeed clear about it.
And how about this for arbitrary? If your account is left dormant for more than
one year, meaning that you do not login and record a search for 365 days,
Presearch will consider your account abandoned and will rescind any unclaimed
Rewards tokens in your account. Your tokens will get stolen after a year of
inactivity regardless.
It's probably a person who cheated OR just used Presearch to get reward,
Then he got upset because the anti-fraud system detected that he was doing
token farming
I shouldn't even have to say it but I have not and would never sign up for this
trash, nor try to earn its fake tokens. And just for fun, let's check out how
the search results page looks these days:
Heh. Half the page taken up by a casino ad. Five ads on the left sidebar and two
top search results are ads. And you want to tell me this crap is something
other than an attempt squeeze money from people who have been bullshitted by its
slick advertising? A quick look at their subreddit makes it even more obvious.
This isn't even a search engine, my friends - that is just a cover for the scam
similar to the microtransaction-filled
games. Anyway,
nothing really changed here (at least for the better) so run as fast as you
can.
Right Dao icon [Right Dao](https://rightdao.com/) Right Dao icon
Another search engine with its own index; if you're hopeful, don't be - it is
bad. I can't find anything related to conspiracies with my usual queries,
though I don't necessarily think they are censoring things - their index is just
that weak. Even obscure video game stuff doesn't appear - but does in eg
Mojeek. After doing a few more tests with other queries, it appears I can find
pretty much nothing I want to, so my verdict is that this search engine is
useless. Oh, and no image search - just Web and News. Despite Right Dao
being useless, let's check out its
privacy (archive)
(MozArchive) while we're
here:
IF YOU ARE NOT AT LEAST 16 YEARS OLD, DO NOT USE THE SERVICES.
Hey, I just happen to be 14. What you gonna do, report me to Joe Biden? Moving
on...
We do not track our users, and do not collect user identifiable information.
I'm tired of these generic slogans, just tell us what exactly you collect - then
we will decide whether we consider that tracking or user identifiable.
We collect very limited data to improve our service.
Improving search quality: we analyze user submitted queries and result
clicks.
Sounds like tracking to me. And not very limited.
And we do not sell and share such data to any third-parties.
Thanks. At least there is that. But...
We retain the information we collect for as long as necessary to fulfill the
purpose and for the purpose of satisfying any legal, accounting, or
reporting requirements.
Worthless. Fucking worthless. Tell us the maximum duration, or you're no better
than the biggest violators. Might as well have said nothing since this sentence
doesn't provide any actionable information to the user (except to stay away
from you). Since they admitted to collecting search queries and clicks, and
(MozArchive) contains
something funny:
Access the Services by any means other than through the interface that is
provided by Right Dao [...is not allowed];
You may not send automated queries of any sort to the Services
Curling chads can go home. Anyway, I'm getting tired already. Can I say
something positive about this engine? Well, it doesn't discriminate against TOR
or Pale Moon. And results appear pretty fast, though they suck. Nevermind, this
is pointless. Just skip it.
4get icon [4get](https://4get.ca) 4get icon
UPDATE February 2024: 4get now has a custom-made captcha required to
solve before you can search; and you get 100 searches per solution. If you block
cookies, then you get a new captcha for every search, which makes the engine
unusable. There are 4get instances that don't have the captcha, though.
New search engine someone recently mentioned to me. It promises to be
simple
Provide users with a privacy oriented, extremely lightweight, ad free, free
as in freedom (and free beer!) way to search for documents around the
internet, with minimal, optional javascript code.
And private:
I don't log IP addresses, user agents, or anything else. The npt
tokens are the only thing that are stored (in RAM, mind you), temporarly,
encrypted.
Just the way I like it :D. Anyway, let's get down to the details. Right off the
bat we have an advantage over SearX in that you don't have to fiddle with
engines in the settings before you search - you choose one during searching.
This means that results get displayed from only one of the source engines, but
that is the way I prefer it. In SearX - if I wanted to see only the Mojeek
results - I'd have to go to the settings and turn all the other stuff off, which
is annoying. What 4get does is much cleaner.
Another advantage is the availability of Yandex and Marginalia as source search
engines, which SearX lacks. More importantly, 4get actually lifts results
reliably; you avoid the famous failing search engines from SearX, which is
what made me give it up completely. Though, this might only be temporary, before
the source search engines start banning 4get. Enjoy it while it lasts (UPDATE
July 2024: yeah, that's gone now). Overall, SearX has more search engines to
choose from, but many of them are duplicates eg DDG and Qwant, or Startpage and
Google - which use the same indexes. Still, 4get lacks a Google-based search
engine option currently, which would be nice to have. UPDATE July 2024:
exists now, as well as some other additions.
SearX has lots and lots more features...but to be honest, I've never needed any
of them aside from the Wayback Machine integration - which is just a convenience
feature that can be easily replicated by hand (edit: actually, it does exist
here if you click the favicon of a search result, to the left of the text).
What I don't like, though, is that - if using DDG or Brave source engine -
images, videos, or Wikipedia results display on the right side of the page. I
get that it's because the source engines themselves do that - but in a simple
engine, I'd rather just remove that and only display the actual results. After
all, Videos and Images are already categories that you can choose. So they
shouldn't be mixed in with the textual results that you wanted. Wikipedia is
also a propaganda site, so I
hate giving it privileged space. I understand that this might be a bitch to
code, though.
So, for me this is the best search engine for now. Aside from that small
issue I mentioned above, it ticks all the boxes. 4get also has an onion
domain.
There is no JS dependency, either. Oh, maybe another issue is that the donation
service is behind Cloudflare - but not really relevant to the engine itself.
IMO, it should just give crypto addresses, and that's that.
Freespoke icon [Freespoke](https://freespoke.com) Freespoke icon
Requested review. I hate doing these now, but this "patient" seems unique
enough, so might as well begin the diagnosis and hopefully finish it quickly.
First of all, JavaScript is required to load the website at all. The website is
horribly designed in general; to even reach the policies, you have to scroll to
the bottom of it, but since trending stories keep being loaded, you will have to
be really quick in clicking the links, since they'll be buried in a second or
two - forcing you to scroll again. And if you allow the entire column for
freespoke.com in uMatrix, an analytics subdomain will also get loaded, which
you will have to separately block later. According to their privacy
policy
Matomo collects this data:
the website from which you visited us from, the parts of our site you visit,
the date and duration of your visit, your anonymized IP address,
information from the device (device type, operating system, screen
resolution, language, city in which you are located in, and web browser
type) you used during your visit.
Freespoke doesn't specify directly whether it uses its own index or not, but I'm
certain it doesn't. You can see in uMatrix that their image search simply loads
the images from Bing. Their privacy policy appears to confirm the reliance on
Microsoft's engine:
But we’ve learned, the hard way, that to reach a like-minded audience we
must participate in the very system that we’re trying to overthrow. Ironic?
Yes. Hypocritical. No. Because we’re working inside the beast to overthrow
it. We’re a trojan horse trying to restore the Internet to a time when no
one company could censor the information flowing to billions of people
because that information dared to challenge said beast’s political ideology.
Nice way to justify being cucks. Here are some other gems lifted from there:
This Website is hosted on Netlify. By default, Netlify collects your
connection request, including timestamp, referring URL, IP address, and user
agent, and all of that data is provided to and used by us only in the
aggregate for basic analytics purposes (“Default Information”). According to
Netlify’s policies, access logs, including IP address, are deleted after 30
days.
Netlify uses cookies to collect this information. The Website will not
function without collecting some Default Information about when and where
users are visiting our Website. This cannot be turned off, but it is stored
and analyzed in the aggregate.
Our searches are 100% private. Freespoke ensures every search is anonymous,
with no intrusive profiling or targeted ads—your online journey is yours,
and yours alone.
Is it truly mine alone? Or also Netlify's? And obviously Microsoft's. There is
also no maximum duration for which the data will be kept:
We retain your personally identifiable information only as long as necessary
for the purpose for which it was collected or as required for necessary
business purposes.
And this is supposed to be private. What a disgusting fraud. You can also make
an account, though I have no idea why you'd do so. In that case, Microsoft will
store your personal information (Microsoft: We use Microsoft Azure, to store
user preferences, “likes” and other individual choices you make for your
account. We also use Microsoft 365 to host our email, and therefore Microsoft
stores personally identifiable information regarding people with whom we email)
all while Freespoke claims you'll be able to Break free from big tech if you
sign up. I wasn't able to create one, either way:
Assuming you did manage it and tried to log in, you'd see this:
Ha! I guess this is how Freespoke lets you Break free from big tech - by linking
directly to https://account.apple.com.
(MozArchive) contains even
more gems than its privacy policy. Wow, it's a treasure hunt today!
No part of the Websites may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording,
except that Freespoke authorizes you to view, copy, download, and print
Freespoke documents (such as press releases and FAQs) that are available on
this web site, subject to the following conditions:
- The documents may be used solely for noncommercial, informational purposes
only.
- The documents may not be modified.
- Copyright, trademark, and other proprietary notices may not be removed.
Fuck you and your "authoritzation". Now watch me reproduce and modify your
copyrighted, trademarked logo:
Sorry for low effort but this trash doesn't deserve more. Anyway, waiting for
the lawsuit; with Phoenix Wright on my defense team, I should be fine. Also, how
does the entire Acceptable Use section make any sense? It's a search engine, I
can't use it to post anything at all. Yet they list all these things you are not
supposed to post, such as blatant expressions of bigotry, prejudice, racism,
hatred or excessive profanity and obscene, lewd, lascivious, excessively
violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable content. And if you dare to
violate any of these points, which seemingly could encompass pretty much
anything - you will be thrown straight into the legal mill to be ripped apart:
You agree that violations by you, or any person or entity acting on your
behalf, of the terms of this Agreement will entitle Freespoke, in addition
to any other remedies including referral for criminal prosecution
[...]
What's even funnier is they require you to defend them in court - and even
pay their attorneys' fees (!), which is double the mockery:
By using the Websites and/or Services, you agree to indemnify, hold harmless
and defend Freespoke and its officers, directors, agents and affiliates
from any claims, damages, losses, liabilities, and all costs and expenses of
defense, including but not limited to, attorneys' fees, resulting directly
or indirectly from a claim by a third party that is based on your use of the
Websites and/or Services in violation of these terms.
So, that's what's supposed to happen if some third party simply claims you
have broken Freespoke's ToS. Absolutely insane. But let's think deeper about it.
How would they even be able to do so if search queries were not stored by
Freespoke? Since that's the only content that's possible to submit through a
search engine. And therefore, I think they are - and probably forever, too. In
that case, I really hope you didn't register an account and reveal any personal
data for them to hang you with.
Anyway, if all of this isn't enough to bury this patient, let's cover his unique
issues, which will definitely be fatal. Namely that the search field will
randomly eat your characters, especially if you type fast. This makes it
basically impossible to actually search, and alone buries this engine. I think
this is related to the search suggestions that automatically get loaded (and
cannot be disabled) for every typed letter. If you try to modify something
that's already in the search field, the cursor will also get moved to the end
after every key press, which seems like a programming mistake that a child would
make. And it pretty much requires starting every request anew, but will still
eat your letters. I even switched keyboards because I suspected it might be
related to a new one I've recently started using, but it's not. Another
possibility is that this issue is unique to Pale Moon, but I don't care even if
it turns out to be so. Shouldn't ever happen either way, and no other engine
suffers from it. Freespoke is also extremely slow, and simply doesn't do
anything more than half of the time. Searching through TOR appears to work
better for some reason.
I have trashed Freespoke enough, so let's try to provide some balance, though
there is not that much available to even start tipping the scale the other way.
However, one feature that I really like exists here, and AFAIK, not anywhere
else. Look:
Definitely increases efficiency - especially the alternative sidebar. I can't
say if the LEFT, MIDDLE or RIGHT labels actually check out, and I obviously
question if they are even descriptive. After all, many types of left- and right-
wingism exist. But I'm sure it has some value and I like the concept of
labeling results simply in principle. It could in theory be adapted for other
ways of categorization, too. This doesn't actually end up mattering though,
because of - well - all the other stuff I've mentioned. They also brag about
linking to some USA-made products - and while Americans might care about this, I
don't. Oh, and they block porn completely, but are supposedly 18+ regardless.
FindX icon [FindX](https://findx.com) FindX icon
I wasn't supposed to review any more search engines, but this one is doing such
a great Mozilla impersonation (pretending to be private with the reality being
otherwise) that I just had to do this writeup. To be honest, I have never heard
of FindX and likely would not have if a reader didn't mention it to me - but
the level of its privacy fakery is so great that it deserves a proud spot as
the last entry in this report. Let's check out their About
page (archive)
(MozArchive) first:
Findx is a search engine for users who value privacy. We do not collect
information about you when you perform searches, unlike most other search
engines. Please read the details in our Privacy Policy. If you worry about
companies creating invisible profiles of you based on your searches and
internet browsing habits - Findx is for you.
The other stuff in there is not very relevant. Remember the above quotes while
we inspect their Privacy policy (archive)
(MozArchive). It starts
with the usual GDPR stuff, but interestingly, it seems to try to squirm out of,
or not explain properly, many of those rights you allegedly have. For example:
You can request that we restrict usage of your personal data. We are only
required to comply in certain circumstances.
And from Section 9:
We may ask you for additional information to confirm your identity and for
security purposes, before disclosing the PII requested to you. We reserve
the right to charge a fee where permitted by law, for instance if your
request is manifestly unfounded or excessive.
Now compare the above with how Qwant treats
GDPR (archive)
(MozArchive). But since I
don't put much value into these laws at all, let's move on to the more important
sections - namely 3.2 Findx Search, which will tell us what their engine
actually collects.
[...] data is transferred to our search partners who only use it to
provide better search results on Findx
So one "partner" wasn't enough, there had to be two - CodeFuel and Microsoft.
FindX also shamelessly claims that Microsoft values your privacy - can you
believe it? Anyway, what is the data being sent?
IP address, user agent string, search term, country and language settings,
filter settings for adult content, active search filter settings (e.g. page
number information), an optional Bing ID (read more below) and the ID of the
organization that should benefit from your search.
So the privacy-respecting FindX shares pretty much everything possible with not
one, but two third parties! Do they have an explanation for that? Sure they
do - but I'm warning you - this will be one of the most idiotic things you've
ever read on the Internet. Better wear a helmet, because the stupidity beam is
coming!
"But you still pass on my IP-address to CodeFuel and Bing". Yes, we have to.
We protect your privacy to the maximum extent allowed under the agreement
we have with them. Other privacy-centric search engines mask part of your
IP-address before passing it on to their partners - we are not allowed to do
that. It is a matter of trust. You have to trust that the privacy search
engines do not pass on your full IP-address to their partners. On Findx, you
have to trust that our partners only use it for what thay say they will,
which is to provide better results on our site (only) - nothing else. We
trust them.
Wow, I've been hit with a hurricane of nonsense and I'm so confused I don't even
know where to start with this. They literally admit to being worse than all
other search engines - since those (such as Swisscows or StartPage) actually
limit the data sent to the providers they rely on. FindX just says fuck that
and dumps all your info onto Bing, then tells you to just trust their
partners to honor an agreement that is never really specified aside from vague
claims of "better search results". Sounds dangerously close to Mozilla's
improve your experience while they abuse all your data. And why would Microsoft
submit to some small fry like FindX? It's more likely they just do whatever the
fuck they want with your stuff. What about the other partner, CodeFuel?
When search results are displayed, tracking pixels reveal to our search
partner which of the results and ads we received were actually seen by you.
Our partner, CodeFuel, solely uses this information for building metrics for
us and statistics about the service usage. The information is not sold or
shared with advertising companies. It simply provides us with information
about earnings and various statistics like how many searches resulted in
display of ads, how many unique users performed searches, how many results
were clicked on etc.
So, FindX assures us that the data collection of CodeFuel is pretty mild. But
their privacy policy (archive)
(MozArchive) tells a
different story:
Certain usage related information regarding your use and interaction with
your device, including the Software & Services and Other Software, such as
when and how you Use the Software & Services and Other Software, how you use
your internet browser and internet search related applications, your
language settings, the web pages you visit, applications you use and the
content you see, access and utilize on such web pages and applications; for
example, offerings and advertisements that you view, use and access, how you
use them and your response to them (ie. clickstream data), how frequently
you use them, your search queries and the non-precise location, time and
date of your searches
Even though FindX explicitly claims in their FAQ
(archive)
(MozArchive) that this data
is not shared with third parties...
CodeFuel acts as a 'middle-man' between small to medium-sized partners and
Microsoft, and passes the data on to them in order to serve search results
and ads. CodeFuel uses this information themselves to build metrics and
statistics about the service usage. The information is not sold to or shared
with anybody
CodeFuel does directly state several times that they do so:
In performing fraud detection and prevention, we use the services of third
parties who will receive and access your PII.
We also use your PII to comply with legal and regulatory requirements
[...] For this purpose, we may share your information with law
enforcement or other competent authorities and any third party [...]
We will also share this information with our professional advisors in the
scope of this purpose.
We may also share your information with our subsidiaries, affiliated and
parent companies pursuant to the legitimate interest for the provision of
the Software & Services to you but their use of such information must comply
with this Privacy Policy.
So two "partners" turned into who the fuck knows how many. There is way more
dirt on FindX - their website also collects a bunch of data, TOS pretty much
makes you a slave, etc. But I don't want to spend more time on this shitty
search engine than absolutely necessary. Needless to say, it's not at all
private and in fact, it's probably better to use Bing directly since FindX sends
everything there anyway while also running their own spy operation (not to
mention CodeFuel and their partners also laying their dirty hands on your data).
This is probably the most dishonest search engine out there, rivaling
VFEmail and
Hushmail in their
shamelessness.
UPDATE September 2022: wow, FindX even manages to only give a few
results (does not go beyond page 1), and it seems they are all censored (no
conspiracy results). Truly the worst search engine in the world.
Stract icon [Stract](https://stract.com) Stract icon
Was really excited for this one as it promised
customizability
(MozArchive) (Immensely
customizable -- We aim to give you the ability to customize everything about the
search. You can block sites, boost sites, prioritize links from specific sites
and much, much more), and I was getting tired of common "indexes" chaining me.
Well I finally got "inspired" to test it out and I'm not impressed. In theory,
(MozArchive) basically make
your own "index". The criteria seem quite limited though; for example, date of
creation / update is not one of them. There is also little documentation on how
to write optics. But the worst issue is that the optics don't even fucking
work! I made a few and uploaded them both to my server and 0x0; a friend also
confirmed with kallist. Stract says that the prefered host for optics is
raw.githubusercontent.com, but that you are free to host them elsewhere -
yet that doesn't seem to work in practice. The optics are lifted, but when
searched through, do not display anything. Therefore the biggest reason for
using Stract has evaporated.
It's still possible that adding a custom optic to GitHub would make it work, but
we were trying to avoid big tech, isn't that right? I actually registered for
GitHub just to test it, having had to enable a bunch of domains in eMatrix and
solve its captcha of nightmares (OctoCaptcha - significantly worse than
recaptcha). Some domains also appear only when you have already solved the
captcha, failing the solution and necessitating another try. All for what? So
that I could graciously add a text file and have an "optic" actually work?
Amazing. But even that had a hiccup because the pasting process (on GitHub)
actually crashed my browser the first time.
Even after I was finished, it took me a while to figure out that the optic
actually works because apparently, it doesn't when you use it the first time and
it also requires enabling a third party domain in eMatrix. Oh, and even if you
have already added an optic, you can't search through it without that third
party request, meaning GitHub AKA Microsoft spies on you every time you search.
Why even the need to add an optic when it's getting lifted from its source
site every time? Or to state this issue in another way, why put it in the URL if
it's already downloaded? Why even need an external service for the optic
instead of a local file? You even need to enable JS for
it (archive)
(MozArchive), as well as
for other things - Javascript is however needed to provide functionality like
changing your settings, liking/disliking sites, managing optics, easily remove a
single site in 'explore' etc. Even changing your settings? Have they not heard
about forms and cookies?
In terms of privacy, collecting Usage Statistics is enabled by default, but can
be turned off. Those include:
- The text used to perform the search.
- The list of urls returned for the search.
- Whether or not any of the results were clicked and if so, which one.
- An id that is autogenerated and unique for each new search.
- A timestamp rounded down to the nearest hour.
Stract also has search suggestions enabled which give "interesting" results such
as:
These can't be turned off, either - even by enabling "Safe Search" in the
settings, which doesn't seem to affect the suggestions. TOR appears to be
supported, but I only did one search through it. No image search or anything
other than a regular website one. Languages available include Denmark, France,
Germany, Spain and US. The speed of displaying results is unbearable if you're
used to any other search engine. Disgustingly, Stract eventually intends to
shove you ads:
In the future we will have, clearly labelled, contextual ads based on your
current search query and a subscription option without ads. Just to
re-iterate; we will only use your current search to match ads and will never
track you across searches.
And at the end they mock you with this:
Oh, and if we ever become evil (maybe by changing our motto) please take our
code and start a competitor. The fact that you have this ability will make
sure that our values will always be aligned with our users.
You are already evil by depending on Microsoft and even planning to add to our
and you've received money from the EU
(MozArchive) for this
project (We've been very fortunate to receive an incredible grant from NLnet
with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet
program which currently funds our development) - money that will surely come
with strings attached. Having source code available doesn't necessarily mean
anything - see Firefox, Audacity, and countless other examples where the values
are decidedly not aligned with those of their users. And the original project
almost always stays as the only one known and used, while the forks just die or
don't change enough. It's also possible to hide bullshit in the code and has
happened many times as well. This is basically gaslighting.
Stract is a good idea, really...finally attempting to put the way searching
works into the users' hands, and make it relatively easy. There's simply too
much bullshit involved in the execution here. Mostly that it absolutely requires
cucking to Microsoft. You can still search without but then it's just a regular
engine that has nothing over any of the others, really. Then, the cock
suggestions show lack of care - it's pretty much beta software. Add the
overdependence on JS, EU funding and future ads and... Like with the Dissenter
situation, I'm hoping
someone takes the good aspects of it but throws away the baggage.
[Marginalia](https://old-search.marginalia.nu/)
This search engine is absolutely awesome. It has found me so
sites that are completely missing from the mainstream
search engines. Of course, it's completely useless for technical questions and
stuff like that; I tried to use it this way for a while but it just doesn't
work. Yet, we have Google and Bing for those things already, right? As the
creator says: It’s perhaps
not the greatest at finding what you already knew was there. Instead it is
designed to help you find some things you didn’t even know you were looking for.
And at this task it performs admirably. The index appears to be a lot bigger
than Wiby's, while still keeping most mainstream trash away because of
heuristics to prefer text-heavy websites and an upper limit on heavy modern web
design inventions. It is a breath of fresh air for someone that's mostly been
chained to the big engines (and their proxies) for all these years.
Unfortunately, Marginalia's heuristics don't get rid of Wikipedia,
StackOverflow, and other stuff I'm tired of seeing. Fortunately, there are
options to kick those out - such as using either of the filters Small Web or
Blogosphere (the Forums filter might be interesting too in an age where all the
commotion is on Discord or Facebook groups). When I go back to a "regular"
search engine, it just hurts my eyes to see all the nytimes and snopes crap; I
wonder how I was able to endure it all those years. Another thing I'm surprised
to have endured are the absolutely terrible visual designs of all modern
search engines - and Marginalia resists this disease, too. Look:
It actually uses colors and margins to separate entries, while all the other
search engines just throw the entire mess right onto the background. In
Marginalia, half the horizontal space of the screen also isn't taken up by a
Wikipedia entry (ugh) or just empty space (like in searx, 4get, mojeek, DDG...).
It just looks and functions great; it is obvious someone with a good eye for
design created it. You are even told which websites contain ads, cookies, or
scripts, and can also deny those that do have JS or ads. Though this is not that
useful for uMatrix chads, it's still nice to see someone even caring to divide
websites by these criteria. I'd like to see Cloudflare as another criteria in
there, while we're at it.
logs are only kept for 24h, and After this window is passed, all logs that may
contain user queries are shredded. Also No information about which links are
clicked is gathered, and it is not possible to historically correlate IP address
to search terms. So are there any flaws? Again, it doesn't find "normal" things
well at all - which is also its advantage and of course we have all the others
that do this. Sometimes the results don't have a lot to do with the exact query,
so treat this engine as an exploratory device, and not necessarily an
informational one. I don't know the creator's exact stance on censorship; he
does say on his about page that if you do find something genuinely in bad taste,
you should report it. But what's the criteria, I don't know. I seem to be
finding all kinds of "inappropriate" stuff that would surely be banned on
mainstream search engines; I suspect it's mostly about porn and violence. There
are also no image results or anything other than just sites - but again, we can
use other things for those. For once, it's nice to have something that does one
thing and one thing well. In the end, Marginalia is one of the best software
projects I've seen recently, after it dropped Cloudflare. Edit: has a worse
default design now, but the old one can still be found
here.
[You](https://you.com)
No idea what this is, except that it is Cloudflared, and therefore useless.
[WebCrawler](https://www.webcrawler.com/)
Same as above.
[Search my Site](https://searchmysite.net)
Same as above.
[MillionShort](https://millionshort.com/)
Same as above.
[Spyda](https://spyda.net)
Same as above.
[Excite](https://www.excite.com)
Same as above.
[4Conservative](https://4conservative.com/)
Same as above.
[GoodGopher](https://goodgopher.com)
A search engine that rejects mainstream sites. Could be cool, but is
unfortunately Cloudflared.
Summary
So, the first edition of this summary was overly positive. I was eager to
finally share some good news after the stuff on Mozilla, Proton, and others
dirtied the privacy climate. However, I severely overestimated the situation
and way overrated several search engines such as StartPage, MetaGer and
DuckDuckGo. The main issue is that all of them lack their own index, meaning
they are fully dependent on the violators. The ones who do use their own
index have weak results. This already proves that the situation is worse than
with browsers (which has the independent Pale Moon as well as various other
smaller, less viable projects) or E-mail. Not only is there no provider
approaching the quality of RiseUp mail - but even the second-tier of E-mail
providers (such as Posteo or Dismail) outclass the best search engines. The
field is also rife with frauds, similar to E-mail. What's a poor user to do,
then? It would be best to pull the plug and deal with the inconvenience of
terrible results, though of course it's hard to actually do that. However, the
situation won't improve until we support the independent search engines. So,
use Mojeek and Wiby to accomplish that. If you're not prepared to ditch the
violators, a good SearX instance is your best bet. I recommend weaning
yourself off Google since they're so heavily censored, therefore StartPage is
out. The wounded privacy warrior marches on, scraping by until a decent provider
finally comes along...
Engine / Feature Requires JavaScript Own index Supports TOR Has onion domain
IP storage Search results Censorship Shares data with third parties
Swisscows Yes No No No No Good Mild Yes
Brave Search For images Doubtful Sometimes Yes No Average Extreme No
SearX No No Yes Conditional Conditional Good None No
StartPage No No No No No Good Extreme No
Wiby No Yes Yes No Yes Bad None No
DuckDuckGo No Partial Yes Yes Yes Good Mild No
Qwant No Partial Yes No Yes Good Mild Yes
Metager No No Yes Yes Yes Good None No
Mojeek No Yes Yes No No Average None No
Ecosia For images No No (CF) No Yes Good None Yes
Oscobo For images No Yes No Unknown Good Mild Yes
Discrete Search Yes No Yes No Yes Good None Yes
Gibiru Yes No No No No Good Extreme Yes
Gigablast Yes Yes Yes No Yes Average None No
Peekier Yes Partial No (CF) No Yes Good None Yes
Presearch Yes No Yes No Yes Good Extreme Yes
Right Dao No Yes Yes No Possible Bad Who knows No
4get No No Yes Yes No Good None No
FindX No No Yes No Possible Bad Extreme Yes
Marginalia No Yes Yes No Yes Average Little / who knows No
You Cloudflare so who cares lol
WebCrawler
Search my Site
MillionShort
Spyda
Excite
4Conservative
GoodGopher
Explanation of issues:
Requires JS - whether the search functionality works without JS or not.
Own index - Green for only using its own web crawler to display the
results, Yellow for own crawler in addition to a violator's index (Bing,
Google, Yahoo...); Red for only violator's
index
Supports TOR - Didn't spend too much effort testing this. If it throws
stupid errors while on TOR, it gets the bad rating. If it doesn't - good
rating. Obviously, having an onion domain makes you automatically green in
this category.
Has onion domain - self-explanatory. SearX is Conditional because only a
few instances have that.
IP storage - this concerns only whether the service themselves stores your
IP address (according to their privacy policy) - not whether some third party
gets it. Concerning SearX, the instance's privacy policy decides whether they
store IPs or not - that is why it's Conditional. Also remember to contrast
this category with Supports TOR - if a service is red in both, it's really
bad.
Search results - this concerns only the amount of returned results. As in,
how easily you can find technical answers, etc.
Censorship - NEW CATEGORY. Whether the search engine censors its
results. I usually check this with queries like "moon landing was fake" and
"COVID vaccines kill". In theory, there should be a mix of sites with relevant
keywords on the first page. If I find that conspiracy theory sites (or any
non-mainstream ones) are being unfairly buried, I give the engine a Mild
censorship grade. If they are not there at all - and I'm being swarmed by
fact-checking sites even though they are not the best fits for my query - I
will give the engine an Extreme(ly shitty) grade. I don't have exact data for
all, some are partially assumed. SearX gets None because it doesn't censor by
itself and you can choose the non-censorious engines in it. But if you rely on
the censorious ones, of course SearX then inherits the grade of those.
Shares data with third party - Embedding stuff from other domains
qualifies (if it's required to use the search functionality). Also, if the
service admits to sharing the data with the search engine they are proxying
(for example, Ecosia giving IP to Bing) - that goes here as well.
You might be wondering as to why I didn't review the Cloudflared engines
properly. That is because using Cloudflare is such a big flaw that the other
qualities of the search engine don't even matter. Cloudflare is a third party
that MitMs your connection and steals your search query and all other sent data,
blocks TOR, and is also able to rewrite the served page without you knowing. I
can't see anything possibly worse than that.
UPDATE July 2024: I've been questioning the way these criteria are set up
recently, I don't find them too descriptive. IP storage is treated as one thing,
when it might be for one day or forever. Query storage is missed completely.
Censorship has many meanings and might refer to censorship of alternative
theories, porn, violence, or just JS-heavy sites. So, the table remains to be
improved but for now, I hope it can still provide some useful information
Lyrics search engines
Was looking for the lyrics to a certain song and thought I might as well rate
all the engines I find. These won't be in-depth reviews; if my (now low)
annoyance threshhold is passed I trash the engine and move on to the next one.
Most engines were found on the first two / three pages of a mojeek / DDG search
from the query "lyrics search engine", and a few from some websites listing
"best lyrics search engines". Anyway let's go:
https://www.seekalyric.com/> - results with error MySQL Error: 3024 (Query
execution was interrupted, maximum statement execution time exceeded)
Session halted.
https://search.azlyrics.com/> - doesn't appear to search without JS, though
it pretends to be loading something. Works with JS enabled, but adding a
keyword for this search in Pale Moon doesn't do anything since the searching
appears to need a token generated by the website. Using TOR throws a captcha
that after solving wants you to wait for like 2 minutes. Database seems small.
https://www.allthelyrics.com/> - no search functionality that I can find.
https://xiryl.com/> - CF.
https://www.aimsapi.com/lyrics-search> - uses AI; appears to need to book a
demo to do anything; the form for it doesn't seem to load in Pale Moon at
least.
https://www.chosic.com/find-song-by-lyrics/> - CF.
https://songfinderbylyrics.com/> - white page without JS; seems to be just a
proxy for google, as it needs their JS enabled to actually search.
https://www.mldb.org/> - somewhat broken CSS (in Pale Moon at least), though
you can partially skip it with the option to Add a keyword for this search.
Many criteria to search by and all are usable through the search bar. I
like it overall but it did not find my song.
https://lyricradar.com/> - CF.
https://findmusicbylyrics.com/> - loads so no CF, but extremely slow to
search and I can't be bothered to wait and see if it graciously works after 10
minutes. Edit: figured out it just doesn't like my VPN for some reason. Tried
through TOR and it loaded quickly but then slammed me with the message of
death: Find Music By Lyrics uses Google's search technology to bring you more
relevant results from top quality sites using lyrics from songs. Hahaha.
https://www.musicgateway.com/song-lyrics> - loads without JS, but doesn't
search even with it (allowed first party only; can't be bothered to play
the umatrix game).
http://www.lyricsbadger.co.uk/> - cert invalid for domain so http is the only
option; it doesn't even matter though because searching 404s with Sorry, this
is the void.
https://www.tune-flix.com/lyrics-search-find-song-by-lyrics/> - CF.
http://www.lyricsbook.net/> - cert invalid for domain, and expired to boot.
Very nice, simple website design. But so what if searching results in error
Errore nella selezione del database (yes even with JS)?
https://www.lyricsforall.com/> - cert expired.
https://www.letssingit.com/> - no search functionality.
https://genius.com/> - CF.
https://searchthatsong.com/> - CF.
https://www.elyrics.net/> - CF.
https://www.shazam.com/> - doesn't seem to be a traditional search engine.
https://www.musixmatch.com/search> - needs three JS / XHR domains allowed in
umatrix to do anything, but actually finds stuff at least. Does not block TOR
either. Feels resource demanding.
https://lyricstranslate.com/en/songs> - just as I was about to give up I
found this gem. Works without JS; has functional and good looking CSS. Can be
added to the search bar like mldb; but unlike mldb it actually found my song.
Enabling (first-party) JavaScript allows to sort by things other than
relevance (date, etc). Some of the songs also have translations; often in
several languages. TOR is allowed. The only "flaw" is pro-Zelensky propaganda
on the main page. But let's end this review on a high note and pretend that
that does not exist.
https://lyricsmode.com> - CF.
https://www.lyricsplanet.com/search.php> - decent design, works through TOR
without JS, but seemingly very small database compared to lyricstranslate (or
even mldb). Can be added to the search bar.
https://www.lyricsfind.com/> - not a search engine.
https://lyricsondemand.com/> - CF.
https://www.lyricsfreak.com/> - looks like a lyrics search engine but
actually isn't and searches only for song titles.
TL;DR lyricstranslate is great, mldb is okay, the rest suck.