I needed to reinstall Firefox on this computer, so I started up Chrome to download the latest version and it blocked the download as unsafe! I had to manually tell it to download anyway.
Fuck Chrome. I’m glad I only used it to download one file and went back to Firefox.
Basically microsoft has a deal with them which makes them give aggregate data to microsoft. Which led to this.
P.S. : I am primarily still using ddg in case someone’s thinking I’m an anti or something.
Ok, seems it’s time to seek next search engine.
I use both SearX and LibreX alongside DDG and that helps with 99% of my daily search online.
If I need to use Google for search, I do so in my tor browser.
Don’t google block your tor browser?
Google serves me captcha and those are not much of a problem since I rarely use it.
The safety of tor browser is great, but I usually use the private mode of safari or firefox, I am lazy to wait for the tor… unless I do some important things.
Browser private modes are not really private, it’s just an isolated window that won’t save your search to the browser history. Google and other trackers would always link your private session back to you.
Read Mozilla’s take on browser private modes.
It’s just a balance between performance and safety. Everyone in different situations needs to consider whether it’s suitable for themselves to make different decisions. The most safe usage doesn’t always mean the best usage for every situation, OK?
You could give 4get.ca a shot. Librewolf recently added it as a default search engine. It seems to work similarly to SearXNG.
That looks great at first until I tried searching and I got hit with a low-res captcha asking me to choose pictures about minecraft because /g/tards bots are stressing the server. I don’t get that on SearX.
Also, the server is in the US, privacy-wise, that’s quite bad.
Yeah, that’s not great. But I never was really happy with SearXNG. Every now and then I had to switch back to DDG because the results were subpar. Also my instance was not available semi-frequently. If 4get works better I’d be willing to solve a captcha every 100 queries, especially since they seem quite reasonable (compared to Google’s captchas).
There are several instances (https://4get.ca/instances, https://4get.lvkaszus.pl/) and the underlying code is open source (https://git.lolcat.ca/lolcat/4get).
Kagi.com is pretty good