It’s better than google but It’s not good. Only options is self hosted searxng
Been using a self hosted instance of SearXNG but recently went away from SearXNG in gerneral. Why? Search results more than often enough ended in timeouts from the search engines. It was frustrating and they never fixed it. In terms of privacy it’s top notch though.
What’s wrong with startpage.com?
Starpage was bought by an advertising company.
I use DDG every day as my default search engine across desktop & mobile. It’s good but the search isn’t as helpful as Google. If you need to you can just add !g to the search terms and get redirected to Google.
I’m not familiar with bangs (things like the !g you mentioned) but if you get redirected to Google doesn’t that kill your privacy because you use Google instead of DDG? Or am I just misunderstanding the whole concept of bangs?
Isn’t DDG essentially a front end to Bing?
It’s more than that.
No.
I run a private instance of searxng on a cloud provider. If you have the know how to run Docker or are looking for a reason to learn it’s a pretty painless setup.
Searxng is a meta search engine that aggregates results from a lot of different search engines. You have the ability to configure which search engines it will use. For example you can have it aggregate results from Google, bing, yahoo, brave, DDG, startpage, and quant. You have a layer of abstraction between you and those services providing you extra privacy.
You can run an instance on your laptop/desktop and access it locally which gives ok privacy and protects from JS and other browser level tracking. Problem is your IP can still be correlated to others in the same network who use google or w/e. Also makes accessing from your phone and other devices a bit more difficult especially outside of your LAN as you’ll need to poke a hole through your firewall and use Dynamic DNS for reliable access while mobile.
Another option with better privacy is to run the instance in a public cloud provider like AWS, digital ocean, Linode, etc. This way Google, bing, yahoo, and other search engines just see the IP of your cloud instance making requests. It also makes mobile access easier since your instance will have a static IP that you can assign a DNS name to.
In both cases you can use Caddy as a reverse proxy to serve as the public endpoint. Caddy allows you to easily set up TLS/HTTPS without paying for a certificate.
You elaborated a lot on your alternative setup but not at all why ddg is not good enough for you or in general.
