Hister: A free & self-hosted personal search engine

[spell]

@ph00lt0

It is quite simple. We know that Google uses your data and stores your searches to serve you personalized ads and tracks you around the web using their other products. DDG evidently does not do this. Not understanding how this is not obvious to you that without having all proof you can already see it is the better option.

Forgive me if I am wrong and that is what you were trying to say @asciimoo, but I don’t believe that he has said DuckDuckGo is doing these things at all. All I have seen him say is that using DuckDuckGo requires trust, same as Google or most other services, and he wants to eliminate that element of trust. I think that is a commendable goal.

@DigitalAutonomy

Also, this would also mean The Tor Project is wrong in using Duck as their default search engine because Duck is not private and to disagree with them on privacy at-least to the extent of DDG is laughable.

Putting your faith in a service simply on the basis of it being included in another respected privacy tool is ridiculous. Any faith you have in a service should be by its own merit imo.

@asciimoo

I’m working on a self-hosted search service called Hister with the goal to reduce dependence on online search engines. It can provide significantly more privacy than metasearch engines like Searx.

Cool project OP. I’m excited to see where this goes.

[asciimoo (Adam Tauber)]

@ph00lt0

DDG evidently does not do this

This isn’t a proof for they are not storing or selling your data. This only means that they don’t use it for serving personalized ads.

The only way to verify if they are truly privacy respecting is inspecting how their internal system works. I can’t do it, so I have no tools to label them as a privacy protecting service.

@ph00lt0

Not understanding how this is not obvious to you that without having all proof you can already see it is the better option.

No, the lack of personalized advertisements is not a proof of being privacy respecting. It only means they don’t sell data this way, nothing else.

@ph00lt0

I really think your project is interesting but your take here is making me doubt you understand the topic enough to guard my data.

It’s unfortunate that not believing a profit oriented corporate entity’s words without having the ability to verify their statements makes you think that my knowledge about privacy is limited.

[ph00lt0]

even if they did they would have far less data than google has. It hurting my brain that you don’t understand this. You lost my trust here.

[asciimoo (Adam Tauber)]

This is ridiculous. I’m starting to think that this is intentional rage bait. =)

Why having less data means that a service is superior in privacy?

There are much-much worse things that personal/search data can be used for than displaying personalized advertisements.

[ph00lt0]

Nah, you are spreading FUD about a privacy friendly search engine and don’t seem to understand that they don’t sell data in the first place but if they did they would not even have as much of a bad impact on privacy as google to which you default.

[DanielM]

@asciimoo

Could you explain what secure RAM optimization mean?

You’re welcome, and thank you for your response.

I recommend implementing stronger security measures. For example, if I use my server on my personal Android device, and my phone is stolen, even if the thieves bypass the main security layer, they won’t be able to access or extract the personal work I’ve done with the service.

I encourage you to continue with the project.

Regarding RAM in safe mode, I mean ensuring that optimization doesn’t break anything—whether it’s automatic or manual—for example, by handling words on a page, unexpected errors, etc.

The documentation mentions memory, but I don’t see anything about safe mode. Perhaps you could combine the current options into a single, separate function.

This gave me another idea: instead of just RAM, expand the functionality to include more options in a single, one-click or automatic function.

[asciimoo (Adam Tauber)]

Thanks for the explanation. I fully agree on prioritizing stronger security measures. I’ve added your suggestions to my TODO list.

[privacyisconsent]

@spell

Forgive me if I am wrong and that is what you were trying to say @asciimoo, but I don’t believe that he has said DuckDuckGo is doing these things at all. All I have seen him say is that using DuckDuckGo requires trust, same as Google or most other services, and he wants to eliminate that element of trust.

I agree, this is what I understood from Hister and to my understanding it is true. Search Engines are inherently problematic for privacy because you need to send the plaintext query/content to a third-party for it to be processed and return results. You can mitigate some of the metadata and fingerprinting problems (non-captcha’d Tor/VPN usage, JavaScript-free support, proxying etc.) but you cannot get around the original problem.