Search engines

Google search tweaks. [1]

What does /g/ use?

• SearX - Its good, however it can be hard to find a good instance, and google searches tend to be broken more often than they work.
• Startpage - Is also very good, however its very slow
• DDG/Yandex/Bing - Is generally not recommended for a number of reasons, however at least its not google.
• Google - Nothing really can compare with the speed and results of google. Its a pure botnet and easily the most evil search engine there is. Unfortunately its the only search engine that's always reliable.

Google

Google is probably the most widely used search engine. However, many on /g/ fear that Google is a botnet, mainly due to the data harvesting the Chrome browser and Google search engine utilizes. Despite this, Google is still one of the best search engines, mainly due to its reverse image search feature. Other reverse image search engines such as TinyEye pale in comparison to Google’s.

Criticism for Google falls under the following main categories:

• Censorship of results
  • Google has often adopted positions which have pissed off /g/entoomen. These range from pushing down search results which link to sites which have received DMCA notices, to making the SafeSearch mandatory to all image searches.

• Tailored results
  • While many people think getting tailored search results is a wonderful thing, rms has this to say on the topic: “I find Google’s argument,”The better to serve you with my dear," to be an insult to our intelligence." Sauce

• Privacy issues
  • That Google tracks user searches and online behavior is no secret. What makes this worse is the fact that Google often shares this information with governments which request it. In Google’s defence, it must be said that they usually follow the law, and do not comply with requests which do not meet the law. Please refer to the Google Transparency Report for more information.
  • Besides, Google has often shown itself to be opposed to online anonymity, and privacy in general. Its CEO Eric Schmidt has had plenty of controversial statements in the past. One example: “I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that, that information could be made available to the authorities” - when asked whether people should treat Google like a trusted friend.

DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is the go-to search engine for people fearing for their privacy from larger engines such as Google. It is preferred by some people because it respects your freedom, meaning it doesn’t track your search history and doesn’t bubble you for personalized searches and advertisements. DDG, as fans often call it, also has very cool search features – called Goodies – like math, programming, music, cryptography among others.

DuckDuckGo has integration into several other search engines with the !bang syntax. Examples includes StartPage and StartPage Images, which you can search by prefixing your query with !s or !spi respectively.

Another reason anons like DDG is that it has ads for 4chan which helps support the cash-strapped website.

The 8chan /tech/ board lists a number of reasons to at least be suspicious about DuckDuckGo. However, RMS uses it when he needs to search something, and the people who represent DuckDuckGo claim that the reasons listed were either mistakes, or irrelevant.

ixquick

ixquick was a meta search engine with focus on privacy. It was merged with startpage.

MetaGer

experimental English support

MetaGer was created by angry Germans, who don't want the NSA to know they're looking for Sauerkraut. Like startpage, it is a meta search engine focused on privacy. Its results come from Bing. Its income is through ads, served based on search terms.

Bing

Bing is generally considered to be right on par with Google, albeit far less popular in usage. Lately, however, anons have started preferring Bing over Google when Google started censoring adult content even for explicit search terms.

If you think you can trust Micro$hit over Google, please discontinue reading /g/ and fucking kill yourself.

Startpage

Startpage is not a new search engine per se. Rather, it takes your search query, and returns anonymized Google search results. This way, you get Google search results, but Google doesn’t get to know who you are. Startpage can also be combined with the Ixquick proxy. On the Startpage search results page, a ‘View by Ixquick Proxy’ option can be used to visit the search result with a proxy. Startpage has SSL and HTTPS add-ons for Mozilla Firefox. Note that Startpage is partially owned by an advertisement company

Setting Startpage as a search engine

What is given to you by Startpage's website won't work, so use this link in the third box when adding it as a search engine: https://startpage.com/do/search?query=%s&cat=web&pl=chrome&language=english Alternatively, you would be better off using a locally hosted page.

Searx

Searx is an open source metasearch engine. It returns anonymized results from other search engines like google, bing or startpage without tracking its users. Searx queries are made using POST requests so that they don't show up on logs or search history. On top of that Searx is open source and self-hostable. It has a hidden service. Here is a list of instances Public instances could possibly become "rogue" and log user activity, similar to Tor nodes being hijacked. Also note that Searx has been blacklisted by both Google, and performance results may vary.