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What search engine should I use?
(sh.itjust.works)
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
In 2019, the advertising/data science company System1 became the majority owner of Startpage. Based on this, I'd say it's worth finding an alternative to Startpage.
Oh really? I'll look more into that thanks.
I saw people mentioning an open source and self hostable search engine (SearXNG) which is cool and I tried it out but it gives not very good results. I tried searching for specific sites and it would show anything but. But it's fine for general info.
I still don't think there is anything else other than startpage that is as private while giving good search results. I don't believe that startpage is collecting data on users like google/Microsoft do and I don't think duckduckgo is as good in that regard either. It still makes sense for startpage to be owned by an advertising company since it does show ads mixed with the search results. The difference is they are not personalised or tracked to you (so they say).
So if you have any evidence of System1/startpage tracking users and collecting personalised data on users for anything other than general usage and diagnostic analytics then I think it's fine. If you do, then I will stop using and recommending it.