In terms of privacy, this is how the Searxes (meta of meta searches) compares to DDG, Startpage, and Mojeek:
| privacy factor | DDG | Startpage | Mojeek | Searxes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| caught violating privacy policy | yes | no | no | no |
| bad track record (history of privacy abuse) | yes (CEO founded Names DB) | owned by targetted ad agency | no | |
| feeds other privacy abusers | yes (Verizon-Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, CloudFlare) | yes (Google, CloudFlare) | no | no |
| privacy-hostile sites in search results | yes | yes | yes (but appears less frequent than ddg) | no (CloudFlare sites filtered out) |
| server code is open source | no | no | no | yes |
| has an onion site | yes (but Tor-hostile results still given) | no | no | yes |
| gives users a proxy or cache | no | yes (using Anonymous View feature) | no | yes (via the favicons) |
Superficially Metager is privacy respecting and there’s even an .onion host for it. So I’ll have to add it to the table in the future.
For the moment, I’ll say that Metager shares the following with advertisers:
- first 2 blocks of your IP address
- user-agent string
- your search query They say it’s for non-personalised advertizing.
Thanks for sharing. Would be nice to have some sources about the claim that DDG is not privacy friendly. Furthermore recently I found this web page about privacy friendly search engines. https://restoreprivacy.com/private-search-engine/ (a website using cloudflare itself). What is your opinion about Mojeek and MetaGer ? (MetaGer is open source and can be self-hosted).
Mojeek does their own crawling. That’s quite impressive, because unlike DDG it means they don’t have to choose from a pool of privacy abusers to buy search results. I did a test search on “petition sites” and was impressed that the first page did not contain the typical privacy abusing cloudflare results (change.org, moveon.org, etc). Mojeek also does not buy hosting from Amazon/MS/Google. I should perhaps add them to the table.
I didn’t know MetaGer was free software. I occasionally use metager.com but my first port of call is Searxes b/c searxes filters out cloudflare sites.
