The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

@Midas
You provided a very useful link, I didn't know this site- it teems with search engines (I already added Disconnect to my list), many thanks.

smaragdus wrote:@Midas
You provided a very useful link, I didn't know this site- it teems with search engines (I already added Disconnect to my list), many thanks.

• Don't mention it.
  
  It sure is handy, especially because you can add the Mycroft Project search itself to the default ones in Firefox -- along with TPFC's, which is probably why I didn't talk about it sooner here...
  
  Another nifty trick is that whenever you're on a search page that Firefox recognizes, the magnifying glass in the the default search bar will be overlayed with a small green plus sign, allowing for easy adding of a new search engines.
  
  Finally a search engine I don't recall seeing mentioned is the Unbubble.eu meta-search...

smaragdus wrote:blekko is no more- bought by IBM, what a shame- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blekko.

Sigh. I know IBM will probably do some cool stuff with this, but as they don't really get into the consumer space, we're unlikely to see a real Google competitor. They might license the tech out to Bing or somebody.

Came across a pretty nice search engine today on Reddit - searx:
https://searx.me

No pagination because it's a meta search engine, but it's very privacy-oriented with a lot of configurable options.

Going to give this one a try for a bit.

I have a question: how does the user know that a search engine like this is really privacy oriented? What stops a company to declare its search engine "very private" and in reality to collect our search strings? Is there any regulation, someone who "audits" these things? Do we just trust them? I see more and more small companies launching this kind of service (secure search engine or similar)...

Edit: I see that I asked 4 questions instead of 1, as I announced... Shame on me...

In the case of searx, it's open-source and used by privacytools.io (privatesearch.io).
https://github.com/asciimoo/searx

joby_toss wrote:I have a question: how does the user know that a search engine like this is really privacy oriented?

That is a hard question but there are a few possible answers:

• Honesty according to business value. In a crowded search engine market dominated by a massive, billion dollar company, you have to differentiate yourself clearly. Going halfway on security seems like a poor long term plan so it is therefore probable that they genuinely value your privacy.
• Danger of dishonesty. Setting a high bar for privacy means immediate attraction for new users but a real danger of immediate decrease should revelations show that's not the case (e.g. hushmail)
• Assume dishonesty. Real security means not trusting any engine at any time with any information. This would be done with paranoid browser settings that carries no unique information between sessions and a VPN/proxy of some sort.

I reverted to DuckDuckGo couple of months ago and I'm much more comfortable with it now. I don't know if they improved it or my searching needs are just different than before, but it's my main search engine for the time being...

I've switched to searx.me almost exclusively. It provides more accurate search listings than StartPage.

The only thing is if you just want Google search results, you need to change searx's settings to disable all the other engines.

@freakazoid
Thanks for Searx, I didn't know that one.

smaragdus wrote:@freakazoid
Thanks for Searx, I didn't know that one.

Agreed. I was impressed by just a few searches. The program is open source, you can run it yourself, and claims not to capture or sell userdata. At the same time the search is very fast and responsive so I wonder how they're paying for bandwidth. You can download results to CSV, JSON, or RSS and, like DuckDuckGo, it doesn't try to customize results.

* Image search was a little slow and didn't quite work
* Video search highlighted subtitles links before actual videos, which was odd
* Mapping gave openstreetmap results
* News results were a little spotty (it couldn't find anything for "last week" or "last month")

smaragdus wrote:@freakazoid
Thanks for Searx, I didn't know that one.

Seems to be one of the few search engines that uses POST requests, which prevents history from logging the queries (providing some form of privacy), instead of appending the query to the URL as almost every other search engine does using GET requests (which has the benefit of being re-searchable via web history).

IXQuick is another that does this and is pretty decent, too. It allows you to generate an encoded URL based on your preferences so you can have 'portable' preferences wherever you use the site so long as you use the URL to begin with, though I've found it sometimes forgets some of the settings during a search session.

Specular wrote:

smaragdus wrote:@freakazoid
Thanks for Searx, I didn't know that one.

Seems to be one of the few search engines that uses POST requests, which prevents history from logging the queries (providing some form of privacy), instead of appending the query to the URL as almost every other search engine does using GET requests (which has the benefit of being re-searchable via web history).

DuckDuckGo has a preference to use POST as well.

SYSTEM wrote:DuckDuckGo has a preference to use POST as well.

Nice. I like DDG's customizable styling. If it had a dedicated image search I'd use it more. Google still provides better general results though. I'll be trying SearX over the next week as it has a pretty decent set of features.

One thing I'm not so keen on about SearX is its 'Cached' links aren't actually cached results but Internet Archive results. As I frequently use cached results on Google I'd much prefer it to redirect there, at least as an option.

Bing
Yahoo
Yandex
Omgili
Boardreader