"A look at search engines with their own indexes"

Privacy
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- by Rohan Kumar (Seirdy)

On the back of the discussion about SearXNG, I found this article really interesting! I particularly like his evaluation of building new search engines:

When building webpages, authors need to consider the barriers to entry for a new search engine. The best engines we can build today shouldn’t replace Google. They should try to be different. We want to see the Web that Google won’t show us, and search engine diversity is an important step in that direction (§ Findings).

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The thing about other search engines is most of them have no spam filtering. Google search is good at protecting users from spam and phishing sites as it detects malicious URLs and removes them to prevent users from clicking on them. A user on /r/privacyguides posted that DuckDuckGo doesn’t have the same level of filtering as when he searched for Github, it showed a fake, malicious link.

Take Wiby for example. Wiby is one of the worst search engines to use because it is powered by user-submitted sites, meaning anyone can submit a fake URL and there is nothing stopping anyone from clicking on a malicious URL. This should really be considered with search engines.

I think Privacy Guides should warn people about the dangers of using other search engines that don’t use Google’s search index. I’m not saying you shouldn’t use DuckDuckGo and I understand if you’re concerned about censorship, but for security-sensitive searches, you should only use Google or a privacy search engine that uses Google’s index, such as Brave search or Startpage.

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The thing about other search engines is most of them have no spam filtering.

This isn’t true, but perhaps you mean that you think their spam filtering is worse? That’s fair enough.

This should really be considered with search engines.

I definitely agree. I think that’s partly why I found Seirdy’s article so interesting: because it’s intended to be a “living document” and gives a very broad overview of different search engines. Hopefully, it could be a helpful resource for making the kinds of those kinds of evaluations. :+1:

My favourite finds were Semantic Scholar, Teclis, and Kagi Search. I’m particularly keen to see how Kagi progresses!