The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

A small search engine that does respect your right to privacy:
https://www.acoon.de/en/

Toxteth O'Grady wrote:A small search engine that does respect your right to privacy:
https://www.acoon.de/en/

I tried one search and the results were far from what I expected. Will probably grow in time as it spiders more sites, but right now, it's not really useful.

freakazoid wrote:

Toxteth O'Grady wrote:A small search engine that does respect your right to privacy:
https://www.acoon.de/en/

I tried one search and the results were far from what I expected. Will probably grow in time as it spiders more sites, but right now, it's not really useful.

I know it's not the best there is, but is has improved recently. It's just another "weapon" in the arsenal of the "no really, we're not evil" search engines. As opposed to...

You could report strange or incomplete results in the blog. The Acoon developer might be able to do something with this information, who knows.


By the way, here is another one:
http://www.semager.com/
http://www.semager.de/info/privacy.php

Not the best privacy policy, but it could be much worse. However, lots of ads, so probably this isn't really usable either.

Another option for privacy, there is also StartPage: startpage.com

From what I have read about the service, they remove identifying information from your query and then submit it anonymously to Google themselves, they get the results back and forward them to you, keeping your information private. Your IP address is not stored, your visit is not logged, and they don’t place any tracking cookies on your browser.

Startpage.com has been mentioned a few times in this thread already, but it never hurts to reference them again!

Ixquick is my favourite search. It seems to be a meta search version of StartPage.

Craunch wrote:Ixquick is my favourite search. It seems to be a meta search version of StartPage.

http://www.portablefreeware.com/forums/ ... 876#p43876

DuckDuckGo just got into a Time article:

How I Quit Google
http://ideas.time.com/2014/02/24/how-i-quit-google/

This mirrors the responses to Google a lot of people I know have had. Sometimes you don't want any help with your searches and, for those times you do, the !g tag in DuckDuckGo is great.

But not bookmarking the most commonly visited sites is just ludicrous.

Here's another one that claims to have some respect for your privacy. I haven't really tested it, so...

https://www.qwant.com/

https://www.qwant.com/privacy

There's a distributed, open source search engine [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_search_engine]. It's GPL licensed and looks promising. As it requires Java, there may be a way to portabilize it, but the program still requires a web browser as a front end. This makes sense, but isn't as self-contained as many on the site would probably prefer.

Screenshots:
http://www.yacy.net/en/Screenshots.html

Homepage:
http://www.yacy.net/en/index.html

Softpedia:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/S ... YaCy.shtml

PCMag review for an earlier version:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2397258,00.asp

The only other program I've tested was Faroo, but it's setup was far too involved. That SEEMS to have been relaxed: http://www.faroo.com/ but the site had no results for "portable freeware", which makes me wonder if it's ready for prime time.

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faroo

Anyway, these look interesting but my guess is they need to hit some kind of critical mass before they're widely adopted.

@webfork wow...
Question: how good are search results? and how does it compare to other search engines.
Either way I'm definitely taking a deeper look/running it. I also wonder how much bandtwich resources does it use.
The task of things to do just keeps growing...Offtopic: has anyone updated Portable Linux (CoLinux)?
There are some guides but in case someone has already done and if/had runned into any issues.
And I'm also considering POS2009 or XP SP3 on Virtualbox in Linux or just sandboxie/firewall.

Marc wrote:Question: how good are search results? and how does it compare to other search engines.

I was trying to rig a jPortable launcher before actually testing this so I can't speak to this. Also, sorry for the delayed response ... I kept meaning to come back to this and actually make the Yacy program portable before testing.

Here's another anonymous (meta) search engine:
https://unbubble.eu/