I wasn’t sure which sub-forum to post this in, so I’ll just leave it right here.
PSA. Not trying to start a political thread here, just spreading information so that everyone is aware.
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I think it’s a reasonable place to put it, since services engaging in shenanigans is at least security-adjacent, as how can we trust them once they start doing that.
I just want services without shenanigans, but that’s getting harder and harder to find. 
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I take these type of situations as an opportunity.
I am a firm believer in the for the community, by the community philosophy. So, I am always interested to learn how the community has addressed specific situations. In this case, I believe the communities respond to privacy-based internet searching is Searx. I will be taking the time to learn more about Searx to see if this project solves this issue for me.
I’d love to see @jay and @lawrencesystems discuss this issue in a future pod-cast.
I’m also very interested in learning others opinions here.
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We’ve been using Brave search for awhile and it’s been getting better over time as they build it up.
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I recently moved to Brave search, about a week before this tweet, but I may stay with it because of this. The reason I moved was that I moved my VPN to another location temporarily (still a residential connection), but for some reason, I get connection timeouts to a few websites on the internet, including ddg
I thought that it could have been DNS, I use cloudflare DoH in Firefox, so I disabled that and used a local DNS, but nope, it seems like at some point, I get through ntwk.msn.net and at the 15th hop, my traffic gets killed, almost as if I my IP is on a blacklist. Probably just Azure filtering traffic not coming from the US. I hit about 7 ntwk.msn.net hops, on the 8th, my traffic stops completely, so I cannot access ddg. Well, screw them anyway.
I may do a mix between brave, yandex and maybe startpage. Startpage is just a proxy for google, like ddg is mostly a proxy for bing (80% bing searches), so for me, there is no more neutral search engines. Searx is a meta-search engine, it just aggregates whatever search engines you add to your instance.
If any of you are going to use searx.org, let me know how that works out for you after a month, I am genuinely curious, I may use the main instance, but being aggregated searches, I doubt the results are going to be any different than what you usually get outside of searx.
My thoughts on Brave:
First, I don’t hide my distaste for ads. However, Brave is doing something that I believe is unethical. Take this with a grain of salt because this comes from unconfirmed sources, but I’ve heard from several webmasters that Brave intercepts ads on their sites and replaces them with Brave’s own ads within the Brave browser. As much as I hate ads, this sounds to me like a copy-right violation.
I just use Brave for YouTube, so I never saw this. Plus we use Pi-Hole. 
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That’s only when you go into the Brave ads program. Brave by default just blocks ads, full stop. I’m not using brave browser, I’m using firefox and brave search. But both Moz://a and Brave have done stupid things. Lately, Brave does less.
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Love my pi-hole !!!
Thanks for sharing that…good to know.
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I switched to SearchX for a couple of weeks but I had trouble with performance (I’m in the Philippines). I also tried several other SearchX hosts looking for one that had better times. I thought I found one but then it went off-line as well.
I finally decided to default to Brave search and have the option of several others from within Firefox depending on what I am looking for …
I’ve had similar experience with Searx. Brave did not work for me as it just doesn’t find things was well as others. Actually, my experience with Brave is it just doesn’t find much at all. By that I mean that it appears that Brave limits their results to 2-pages??? What genius came up with that?
I’m still looking for, the best for me, search engine.
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