I've seen a lot of discourse over which browsers we use and I myself have made the switch from brave to firefox. I still use brave as my search engine though, so… which do yall recommend? Is brave's engine necessarily bad to use? I personally like its ui/theme.

  • upperleft@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    It’s pretty rare for people to not be logged into a Google service though, especially on mobile.

    If that is the case then this conversation is somewhat moot isn't it? But I also don't really think it is all that rare for iOS users.

    You can get a bunch of people to use it though (friends and family).

    That's a good point, definitely see a benefit then.

    I also doubt they build profiles just based on IP, since it’s not uncommon to share IPs given the IPv4 shortage. There’s also CGNAT where hundreds of thousands of people share a sml number of public IPs.

    Certainly, and because of that you don't really need a proxy.

    There are definitely some benefits to such a setup, I just don't think it really is superior to a search provider that is built around not logging and selling your searches. At least not to the degree it gets recommended in these types of posts.

    • dan@upvote.au
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      An idea I forgot to mention is that you can use a VPN on your self-hosted SearxNG server so that all searches go over the VPN. That'll definitely anonymize them. If you use Docker, there's ways to route particular containers through a VPN container which is perfect for this use case (you can make it so just SearxNG goes over the VPN while everything else goes directly to the internet).

      There are definitely some benefits to such a setup, I just don't think it really is superior to a search provider that is built around not logging and selling your searches.

      I agree with this, but does such a provider exist? Kagi may be the only one that truly does it. DuckDuckGo might do it too I guess.