I got tired of putting my trust search engines that run on somebody else's machine.
DuckDuckGo blocks all trackers, but it silently whitelists Microsoft's (because of the commercial agreement they have with Bing), except that they failed to mention it until they were caught with their hands in the jar.
Startpage is Dutch, it's notoriously sensitive on privacy and it's been around for longer than Google, but it's now been acquired by an ads company and I don't see things going well for it.
Brave claims to be the ultimate solution for privacy, except when they put some crypto miner to run in your browser so they can make a bit of extra money on the side.
So I've decided to take even this matter into my hands and run my own search engine. You can access it at https://search.fabiomanganiello.com. It runs SearXNG in a Docker container on one of my servers at home. It's a bit slower than major search engines, but not that much, and it's still a little price I'm ready to pay for freedom.
@blacklight @humanetech Updated information: DuckDuckGo has removed the carve-out for Microsoft. https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-scripts/?guccounter=2
@jeremiahlee @humanetech @blacklight It’s not about the DDG browser though (which was the tainted product [not the search service]). It’s about #DDG getting caught for the ~4th or so time deceiving users. http://techrights.org/2021/03/15/duckduckgo-in-2021/
@jeremiahlee @humanetech that's good to know, but it's not enough for them to get back my trust. They removed it only because somebody found the "silent tracker" and a big fuss came out of it. But they still have commercial agreements with Microsoft, because Bing is the main source of their content. So it's probably just a matter of time before they find another less noticeable way of ensuring that Microsoft still gets something out of the deal.