BYE DUCK DUCK GO, here's my new search engine! Private Alternatives to Google

[@TheLinuxEXP]

Get 100$ credit for your own Linux and gaming server: www.linode.com/linuxexperiment

[@pixl_xip]

Wait what? 7h ago?

[@MickenCZProfi]

I actually hate Startpage because its slow and that it could be improved, so I messaged them with how and with other feature requests. They totally ignored most my emails and only replied to one (telling me that displaying the math widget when adding decimal numbers with decimal commas instead of points is a good idea) and that they will forward it to the devs and they will implement it. This was probably over a year ago and a query of "1,2 + 5,4" still doesn't work. This customer service is awful.

[@OPIXdotWORLD]

good show THANX.. i have been pushing the googe searchs right to the limit and they lie EVERY time about total number of returns for any search... eg it will say "35,000,000 result" and if u scroll down to advance the page to next, goto END, and do it till u get to page 50... there is never a page 50...!! and only ever 50-500 actual results. WTF..??!!!!

[@weltsiebenhundert]

So you now use Firefox with Ecosia? Or is there now an Browser Ecosia with Ecosia Search engine?

[@BlumkinFPS]

ja ichform du und dann bin ich schaus ich bin halt so und so t überhaupt dass du mir das nicht gut findest und wenn dann lust das ich hab mich schon so viel zeit wie du bist du hast du dann noch was anderes hast du dir ja voll die augen und dann hast du das schon so gemacht ich bin so stolz dass das alles so geht ich glaub du kriegst das du magst du bist so ne kleine und gute nacht hast es so schön dich auch nicht zu sehen dass ich mich so lieb und dass ich das so lieb ich weiß viel zu machen ich hab mich auch nicht

[@TheMetaldudeX]

I’ve settled with the fact that 1 search engine isn’t enough. You gotta search the same things on different engines to turn up different results.

[@TheLinuxEXP]

That's also a good idea!

[@UlfRompe]

That's where a meta search engine like searx/searxng makes your life easy. For every hit it shows exactly which of your configured search engines delivered it, and yes, it's surprising how often Google is not in the list.

[@StiekemeHenk]

That's why I love FireFox so much! Just have Google as a backup in HTML only mode! Perfection.

[@blackpirate8748]

@@UlfRompe it gets slow, and most of the time you dont need all different search engines

[@sm_stormzy1075]

Searx

[@HeroRareheart]

Im rooting for Ecosia myself, the bing backend is a little bit concerning but the tree planting is a very noble cause and quite successful at that.

[@thenujansandramohan8930]

@@a.s.239 But the problem is i'm too lazy to actually do anything by my self

[@nataestanislaubastos7637]

@@thenujansandramohan8930 then don't act like you care

[@Tywele]

"rooting" :D (ecosia is great, have been using it for a few years now)

[@spoonikle]

@@a.s.239 Bing used to actually be good privacy wise in the past. like, 2016ish So what changed?

[@spoonikle]

@@a.s.239 How? i know I can do some guerrilla botany and spread native plants and stuff… but its actually illegal. I have tried volunteering but every local group within 40 miles is spending most of their time recruiting and fund raising, the best is my local park maintaining group… but thats mostly cutting down rotted trees and clearing paths… hardly much of an impact, yet I still show up to keep the trails cleen. I don’t “own” any land, any effort I could make to “help” more than “ecosia” in a day are technically illegal. You can say - go vegan, bike to work, etc. etc. - but if im ticking a bunch of eco boxes… might as well search with ecosia and donate to ecology restoration projects directly.

[@jjdawg9918]

Privacy aside, The Duck Duck Go search results have been so poor lately, I find myself resorting back to Google when looking for technical stuff. Not supporting(or rather ignoring) the -,+ (exclude, require) operators really hurts Duck Duck Go. Will definitely try out Ecosia

[@CMSonYT]

duckduckgo was good a couple possibly as little back as two years ago. Of course, nothing beats 2000s or at least early 2000s era google search.

[@fumanchu4785]

@@CMSonYT Well, metacrawlers did. Searchin' Google, Fireball, Yahoo and other relevant engines at the same time, bringing better results!

[@SayAhh]

The MS link might be why when i search for the keyword "news," Google News never comes up.

[@kiillabytez]

Maybe learn to use proper search etiquette?

[@villieyourdaddy]

How's your ecosia going? Switched recently, seems ok for now but not sure if search results as good as for other enginges

[@filipjovanovic8138]

I remember trying Ecosia out years ago because I liked their mission, but never switched to them completely. But wow, they've come a long way. Guess it's time to switch.

[@miguelguthridge]

Piggybacking on this to say that another great thing is that their financials are completely transparent, which is a huge plus for any not-for-profit organisation

[@sabinelemon]

Yesssss so true :))

[@pumpkinjutsu1249]

Definitely a time to switch, they changed their design to a new one. I personally liked the old look and feel, but the new one is good too and the results are great too.

[@Amiska5v5]

Maybe if they get a nice dark mode or customize options like DDG

[@pumpkinjutsu1249]

@@Amiska5v5 you can use dark reader for that

[@matthewsjardine]

One of the reasons Duck Duck Go did not disclose the Microsoft trackers and cookies was because it was under contract not to do so. What's to say that other Bing or Google based search engines are not under the exact same contract? They would not be allowed to disclose, so we are none the wiser.

[@Philipp..]

Well the tracker part had nothing to do with their search engine but with their anti-tracking tool and I don't think these other search engines provide something like that.

[@softwarelivre2389]

Wait, why would any company sign a contract with Microsoft that forces said company to do false propaganda in exchange for profit? And why should we trust such company?

[@kamathln]

Such type of contracts must themselves be made illegal

[@squidbeard492]

I doubt they had to include the "false propaganda" clause. They simply did something against their promises. Same as every dirty politician has

[@matthewsjardine]

@@Philipp.. I think you are right, it was something with their browsers and extension. I don't think it was the search engine.

[@StiekemeHenk]

If SearX/Slow is slow then you've checked search engines that are slow. Deselect the slow ones and you're speedy again.

[@StiekemeHenk]

@@darktoaster69 good point!

[@MV-wv8xz]

Keep your favorite search engine as the home page, then your second favorite as the default search engine when you search in the url. That way you have two quick options to choose from.

[@NabekenProG87]

Good idea, but I use the url bar more than the search on the start page. I will just swap your idea around

[@BooBoo314159]

You haven't mentioned the French one, Qwant. It's the one I've been using for a few years now. I don't know whether it'd suit you, but you can have a look ☺️ They have some advance image search, but I never use then so I don't know how good it is.

[@ericbrunel8933]

There has been a lot of controversy around Qwant which are quite known here in France, and maybe Nick - who is French - has heard enough of it to discourage him to even consider it as an option. Qwant seems to spend way more time and money lobbying around their supposed "private" and "local" aspects to get public subventions and to force people in French administrations to use it, than they spend building an actually working search engine. After years of existence, a few articles have basically proven that Qwant is still not much more than a thin layer around Bing when they were supposed to build their own index. I personally used it for years because I wanted to encourage them, but I found the quality of the search results to be less and less acceptable. Not to mention the latest graphical changes which turned them into one of the ugliest website I know of today... Seeing all of this, I gave up on them and switched to Brave search, whose search results - even in French! - honestly put Qwant to shame...

[@kf9928]

@@ericbrunel8933 I am currently using it and am not to happy with Qwant. So this is good to know. I guess I might also switch to Ecosia too. But Nick should have definitely mentioned it.

[@fgsaramago]

Qwant has an awful privacy policy. They straight out tell you they might share basically anything they want with microsoft

[@DarkLink606]

On top of all that has been said, Qwant geoblocks itself for users in countries it allegedly "is not ready for serving", it won't even let you try. The only way to circumvent is changing your IP, but why bother?

[@georginamcewan8846]

I used Qwant for a bit and the site was down frequently.

[@gmt-yt]

I think the structure of trustworthiness, efficacy and feature-completeness we see in search engines today is kind-of dictated by economic forces and would approximately re-emerge were it disturbed. One thing we haven't had (?) since Altavista is the killer combo of strict full-text substring search (no AI, no spellcheck) and boolean operator nesting. These were an absolute godsend for avoiding SEO and other bad results that plague the here's-magically-what-you-wanted-but-not-what-you-asked-for engines we have now. Yes it could be a bit of a process to get where you were going but if it existed in the index, you could find it with those features. Hmm, sorry, off-topic rant... guess I'm still bitter.

[@____-gy5mq]

‎

[@TheExileFox]

hence why it's not "SEO Optimization" that is done today, it's "SEO Pollution"

[@PrussianJaeger]

I personally don’t mind Brave, I don’t care for the crypto stuff and just turn it off. I like the fact that they have their own engine, and have publicly stated that they don’t downrank based on politics. By using their search engine, it actively improves it, and if I really don’t like the results I just bang startpage.

[@safariknight3239]

you do what to startpage- (I need help lmao)

[@robonator2945]

tbh I don't get people's issue with crypto. Sure NFTs are cringe and some people use it for sketch, but at it's core it's just a good technology. Hammers are also a good technology, and they can also be used for bad things by bad people. BAT is used to actively support privacy conscious creators, not make money as a scam currency. It's using crypto for something meaningful, not just as a buzz word or to feel special.

[@bandito241]

@@robonator2945 if someone don’t care about crypto or NFT why should they have that option on, if they are not going to use it?

[@KunalKumar-dz4kb]

@@bandito241 If a person doesn't care about it they just turn it off on the first start they'll never have to do it again.

[@keilmillerjr9701]

Your comment is so huge. I can't believe Nick refuses to mention anything about the reason people are seeking alternatives to google, and at the same time holds his breath on yand*x. What other biases will we get? Thank you for sharing your comment. The only issues I have with brave, the chrome based browser doesn't have a native gtk look, and sometimes the search engine is slow. Hence having a backup. I will use and support a company that complies with not curating and cens0ring content.

[@drumetul_dacic]

Sadly, since 2021, Ecosia is Cloudflared, and therefore useless from the privacy point of view, or for people that use Tor. Their claim to fame has been planting trees for every 45 searches (that's an average) you make using their service - but this, of course, relies on Bing ads being displayed (and I doubt it can counter the rampant deforestation, anyway). It's not very private by default - For example, when you do a search on Ecosia we forward the following information to our partner, Bing: IP address, user agent string, search term, and some settings like your country and language setting. However, it claims to respect the DNT header: If you have "Do Not Track" enabled in your browser settings we do not collect any analytics data. Most other websites ignore this setting - we think users should have a choice. Is the IP address apart of analytics data? Depending on how literally the DNT information is interpreted.

[@wlonsdale1]

How do we know they actually do that?

[@robbiejames1540]

"I doubt it can counter the rampant deforestation, anyway" not with that attitude! If they had Google's market share, deforestation would be over in years.

[@agoniavr]

I’m still using DDG(search results are good for me both in English and Italian) but I like that you chose Ecosia! Also, I wouldn’t see a negative as “it uses Bing servers which are not carbon neutral” but more of a positive like “instead of using JUST Bing I’m using its search index to also help the planet a bit through Ecosia” Would be better if they had their own index and servers using green energy and stuff but even using Bing through them is better than nothing imho :)

[@quazar-omega]

Is it only me or do you also get Spanish results in DDG when you search in Italian sometimes? I don't know if it's because in those cases the words just happen to exist in Spanish as well, but it really doesn't make sense to me

[@Zszywek]

Isn't Ecosia using Bing as well?

[@agoniavr]

@@Zszywek it is, but as I pointed at least using Bing through Ecosia you're helping the planet if you click some ads. If you're using "just Bing" you're not, so every Bing query that you do through Ecosia instead of Bing should be better than just using Bing alone.

[@agoniavr]

@@quazar-omega it never happend to me to be honest, but it might be because I also set my usual search location as "Italy"(the first option on the left under the search results) and disable it only when writing in english and searching for international results

[@quazar-omega]

@@agoniavr oh, I see, I never did that since I search in both languages on a daily basis, I guess I'll have to set it when searching in Italian then, thank you

[@alecksgates]

Surprised you didn't mention Qwant especially since it's made in France

[@TheLinuxEXP]

Company seems shady, and employees seems very unhappy there

[@ToadalChaos]

I'm confused. DuckDuckGo and Ecosia share the same Bing backend. So shouldn't the quality of results be almost identical? While I greatly appreciate this video and the work you put into it, I'd be interested in a more quantitative/objective comparison when it comes to result quality.

[@foxdk]

I was thinking this the entire way through... First he goes on about how DDG results are awful, and how he can't live with it. Next he praises Ecosia for their awesome results. Both sites gets their results from Bing. It does not make any sense.

[@Dragonlord-yb8ch]

The only problem with ecosia is that when I search for something, I don’t like staring into the sun. I need dark mode

[@TokskDokss]

I came after a year to say that they added dark mode lol

[@alicesmith2636]

I love ecosia! I always use it and it's amazing! The only thing I wish they had was a dark mode and better cards (like dictionary definitions being at the top instead of under ads or a stock page) but they've done a lot with those recently, so hopefully they'll get as good as googles.

[@DarkGT]

I took a look at Ecosia's site and this was the first thing they say about privacy : "We don’t store your searches permanently We don’t create personal profiles of you based on your search history. We actually anonymize all searches within one week." A week? Why not a day or hour.

[@Winnetou17]

Depends on what "anonymize all searches" mean. The thing is, it might be something computationally expensive to do it on the fly and for a single item at a time, and having a process that runs in paralel and does it in bulk might be better. Of course, it can run, like you said, every hour or every day. Depends on how it works. It might be a workload that has to pass through every ... something, and that might take a whole day, and scale slowly based on the amount of traffic or links fetch or whatever. So it's something like it takes a day to run on very light weeks and two days to run on very busy weeks. Or it might be simply that it runs on some databases or indices that are offloaded, that is they're not the current databases anymore, and that switch occurs once every week.

[@rohanofelvenpower5566]

@@Rivanni maybe they grab weekly statistics anonymously? global searching trends, etc.

[@piface3016]

Yeah Ecosia is not private at all. We have no clue what they do with your data in that one week of *non-anonymized* storage, and if they give it to Bing then it's as bad as using Google. And they do in fact give it to Bing. If you go to Ecosia's site and click on "Privacy" (I can't link because KZbin deletes comments with links), they say the following: "For example, when you do a search on Ecosia we forward the following information to our partner, Bing: IP address, user agent string, search term, and some settings like your country and language setting." This is even if you have "Do Not Track" enabled. I don't know what's up with this channel recommending closed source software so much, in another video I saw him talking naturally about using Steam, in another one about bringing Linux to the mainstream one of his main points was "It would be great to make Photoshop and other Adobe software available on Linux"... At this point you've gotta ask, why even use Linux?

[@Electrodexify]

@@piface3016 While also berating Brave and not explaining as to why he doesn't like the company, just because it's in the Crypto market. Aren't most companies that look towards the future adopting crypto?

[@lifelover69]

@@Electrodexify >"not explaining as to why he doesn't like the company" - "because it's in the Crypto market" that's literally the explanation

[@davidadelstein1064]

Look up Trey Grainger and the project he's working on, he wrote the book on this stuff.

[@jarediseli8688]

Is this trey from presearch? If yes, absolute brilliant guy

[@Gersonzao]

Am using Ecosia for months and the only things that I didn't like were: those 'bangs' aren't known to most people due to it being only displayed in one of its support/FAQ pages, and because it doesn't have many snippets as Google Search and Brave Search. Also, it took a very long while for then to add a dark mode (they added it in the past 6 months), even though people were asking it a for a long time

[@StarfoxHUN]

Interestingly, i trust more in Brave with their openness about their integrated crypto. Its just that, in these days, 'Free' doesn't really exists. Every browser has to get money from some source. And honestly, with Brave being so open about their crypto stuff makes me not wonder about all the shady stuffs that could go in the background to earn the money. I can trust that they earn money from their crypto and not from my data, which i can't say from about basically any other browser that does not makes me clear how they earn their upkeep fee.

[@CodeEnthusiast78912]

i've been using brave engine since it started and its really good. I rarely need to use google for something very spesific if it doesn't show up on brave

[@senritsujumpsuit6021]

I use searx for my search engine inside brave

[@KitOkunari]

YACY is a decentralized search engine that is worth checking.

[@drumetul_dacic]

It's pretty good, but it uses way too much storage space and computer resources.

[@inuyashatoast6246]

Quite happy that ecosia is doing good. Uded it for few years now. Had some problems when I searched something very unique issue in coding for example but mostly never had a issue except the missing dark mode. Thanks for the good video. It was very interesting to see how the others perform in a comparison

[@kenneth_jensen]

Great walk through of some great search engines and your thoughts. Right now I'm on startpage, but I will get ecosia now, just to see the difference 👍🙂

[@Michael-Archonaeus]

I've been using Ecosia for over a year now, and it's honestly a great search engine. I love the tree planting cause, which was the main reason for me to use it, I also use a phone company that donates its profits to environmental causes. I think this is a great way to help the planet out, because it doesn't really cost anything, but it makes a big difference!

[@VincentAndre_HK]

I am with Ecosia for a while now, although at first, I had to switch to Google once in a while for very specific searches (especially related to coding / technical matters), but I find that lately, I switch to Google very very seldom. In terms of privacy, I have to admit that I did not dig into the topic, but from your video, I feel right. Funnily enough, my G Suite stopped the unlimited plan about the same time and that lead me to also abandon Google drive to the profit of a private Nextcloud hosted at home and Google Photo was also abandoned also to the profit of Nextcloud (looking into Photoprism in complement), so, I am slowly leaving the big tech.

[@pierredalbianco6258]

What about Qwant? They are privacy oriented and French!

[@puffylinux8653]

I remember hearing about Ecosia long ago but I'm glad theyve improved their search engine over the years. I tried it out back when it was relatively new and found it wasnt good enough for me, however with this video I can tell they've really made strides to improve it and so I think I'll also switch from Duckduckgo to Ecosia, thanks for the info!!

[@proctoscopefilms]

Bro we had the same idea I guess lol just set up my own Whoogle instance. If anything on the internet is personal, it's our internet searches. Feels like the kind of thing that should be self-hosted.

[@Electrodexify]

Presearch also I'd self hosted and partially hosted by the company, in surprised Nick hasn't mentioned anything about this search engine.

[@Finkelfunk]

Be weary guys: Google hates, like, _REALLY_ hates competition. Mentioning some of the pages in this video will trigger KZbin to silently delete your comments after about a minute of them being online. Gotta love this free internet of ours.

[@jojoyoustudio]

I hate that, they also delete my comments here. I was trying to write about my search engine that he can try.

[@Finkelfunk]

@@jojoyoustudio They do that all the time. This isn't them being weird, this is them being deliberate. There are less controversial things like search pages that get deleted, but also extremely important topics like the first cyber weapon's name that will get your comment sudoku'd. They actually stay up for about a minute, then just disappear into the ether. So they must want you to think your comment was actually posted and forget about it while silently removing it a minute later. I mean their algorithm checks comments immediately for certain banned words and phrases, there is no other reason why they'd do it like this if that wasn't what they are after. They could just not let you post them but that would make it all too easy to figure out banned words. They even retroactively flag and remove edits of comments. This company is a god damn joke.

[@jojoyoustudio]

@@Finkelfunk Yea, I was here with 26 like on video. Posted comment and thinking I am here almost first, then they deleted it, and I am like. I hope he will read my new comment because it is quite late. Edit: sorry for other comments XD

[@b_uppy]

Interesting! I just did that elsewhere and the whole thread disappeared...

[@drumetul_dacic]

It happened to two of my comments so far, for mentioning a search engine that starts with "pre" and ends with "search".

[@JauStudioFR]

Why did you forget Qwant ? Did they do something wrong ? It's super efficient. You can choose to search as French, british etc... The image search is awesome with type of ile, licence etc... I always easily find docs, tech discussions, as well as more ordinary things like gaming or news stuff.

[@masterbuck]

Enough controversy with Qwant to put me off forever! The articles are many and quite concerning…

[@JauStudioFR]

@@masterbuck Like ?

[@drumetul_dacic]

Also left out Presearch.

[@Electrodexify]

@@drumetul_dacic agreed, Presearch is a unique one and plus it's decentralized, I run several self hosted instances

[@LimBrian]

I 've been using searx. Theres a firefox addon called libredirect that has a "test latency" function. Finding a consistent and fast instance results in significantly faster searches than a random searx instance. Also, deselect engines that are slow on searx helps with speed. Personally I hardly search images so the disadvantage mentioned in the video does not affect me much.

[@duckrinium]

I'm agreed with your word on DDG. It defeats whole purpose using Duck Duck Go for privacy if you still end up using Google half of the times.

[@luisnabais]

Don’t search in google. Search in startpage if needed.

[@duckrinium]

@@luisnabais My comment is about DDG. Startpage here is irrelevant.

[@luisnabais]

@@duckrinium actually it is relevant. If you don’t like the ddg results and end up using Google, just use ddg with the startpage bang when needed.

[@duckrinium]

@@luisnabais I'm talking about using one main search engine to always bang to the google. Your solution sounds more like "Don't use this, use X", when I never asked for one. I do understand what you mean but I was talking about DDG and not how to fix it.

[@TheVerrm]

That's smart youtubing right here. You're making content while basically making content (testing new search engine while creating other videos). Brilliant!

[@patanka3498]

Hi nick I’m using Qwant and ecosia. Both of them are good for me. I’m doing my search in French English and polish. What’s about Qwant? It’s French base. Enjoy and thanks

[@WildVoltorb]

Qwant has blocked my country, for some weird reason. I think it only works on europe

[@madthumbs1564]

@@WildVoltorb They do localised search results. I doubt it's blocked so much as unsupported at the moment.

[@JoelFeila]

@@WildVoltorb I use it in the usa

[@user-qj9ye1uv8g]

qwant is good but God the new redesign they did some months back is absolutely awful

Too bad Nick aroused mixed feelings about the "dark side" of Brave. In spite of everything, I think I will continue sticked, both browser and search engine, 'cause they work fine for me and I usually don't think what the company is doing backstage (until I saw Nick's video). If the crypto stuff gets even darker, maybe it's good to keep Ecosia in mind.

[@VRayDantesTrygorn]

I've been with Ecosia too for years now. The search didn't use to be very good but improved a lot. I really like it

[@Chrobin111]

Another option is Qwant. For me, the greatest advantage is that they're completely European.

[@stormtrooper3455]

There is LILO too. A French search engine: Sorry for non French users, I explain how it works, I don’t think this engine is a good solution for you: *Avec Lilo les recherches ne servent pas à planter des arbres mais on collecte des gouttes d’eau. Ces gouttes d’eau peuvent être reversées à des associations de votre choix pour financer leurs projets.*

[@jimmyrichards5595]

I use LILO in the late 90's and early 2000's... in order to boot into my linux installation. The Linux Loader! 🙂

[@theviniso]

Qwant is French as well, isn't it?

[@stormtrooper3455]

@@theviniso yes it is. It's based on bing. It doesn't have a lot of success in france.

[@stormtrooper3455]

@@jimmyrichards5595 😀 that boot loader still exists

[@dragonsage6909]

I built a Searxng server on a Raspi, works great in my internal network.. Thanks for this review.. :)

[@paulmalin717]

Ecosia est peut-être un bon moteur de recherche (normal, c’est Bing) mais il a malheureusement pour moi toutes les caractéristiques du greenwashing : - lié à une grosse compagnie qui a intérêt à ne pas changer son modèle (même si j'admet que Microsoft n'est pas le pire des géants) - « on plante des arbres » est une solution naïve et simpliste à un problème multi-factoriel surtout qu’on voit beaucoup de critiques émerger. Les grandes questions sont : est-ce de la monoculture d’arbres ? Des indigènes ont-ils été privés de leurs terres pour planter des arbres ? Last Week Tonight a consacré un épisode sorti cette semaine justement sur le greenwashing. - Sur ce point : toutes leurs actions sont en dehors de leur pays où est leur siège social : l’Allemagne. Ca pue le néo-colonialisme où il faut aller aider les « pauvres moins civilisés ». - On met du vert partout et « pouf », c’est écolo. C’est une technique marketing basique qui n’a aucun sens si les intentions ne sont pas suivies de faits clairement montrés. - C’est une société commerciale, c’est clairement dit sur leur page wikipédia donc à garder en tête.

[@grimtermite191]

Agreed, I have heard that many companies that “plant trees” (not necessarily ecosia) will fund the planting of these trees but after that no care is taken of them and they are left to die, then the next company can “plant trees” on the same land

[@FunkeyPhysicsMonkey]

The channel "Our changing climate" did a video on Ecosia and they had concerns, but overall said that their is more potential benefit than harm with using it so while it wont save the world or plant nearly enough trees, it still is likely better than most if not all search engines on the environment and does do some good

[@robbiejames1540]

These issues (greenwashing by planting random trees that will die) are answered on ecosia's website. They don't do this, and have no skin in the greenwashing game, anyway (as they are not for profit, literally their whole purpose is planting trees).

[@DavidHerron]

I'm using SearxNG - and find its image search tools to be good. The performance improved when I moved the hosting from the computer on my desk to a cloud server.

[@andyembranco3049]

I can understand the apeal of planting trees but after seeing this video I decided to test spot and it seems pretty satisfying tbh

[@belgarathlesorcier8385]

Hi Nick, you didn't mention Qwant, you don't like it or never tried? It's a french search engine

[@rolf8064]

Can you choose which project to support? Some few are questionnable.

[@TheLinuxEXP]

The revent employee leaks paint a bad picture of Qwant :/

[@belgarathlesorcier8385]

@@TheLinuxEXP oh ok I didn't know anything about that...

[@iopqu]

I watched this exact video and switched to Brave Search. Independent index is very important

[@joshaprior3699]

If ddg and ecosia both use bing, what is different between the results?

[@rafalg87]

Yeah, this is a little confusing.

[@trevgauntletneu_gaming]

Brave, it's so bad that it pays you to use it.

[@Gabriolus]

DDG Lost a lot of people when they stated that they were gonna censor some searches

[@valso]

After a few days of testing, I'd say Ecosia isn't bad but when it comes to search for serious stuff (such as how to fix certain Wine errors), it displays nothing. No search engine can beat Google yet. Googling with exactly the same terms (text and number of the Wine error), I get 2 results only but they're enough to find a solution. Ecosia, the Duck and a few others seem to avoid the word "Wine" for some reason and often display results for Windows only. The only reason I'm gonna keep using Ecosia as a default search engine is because it displays a lot better results in image search. Google hides some results bc of the idio_tic copy right policy, whereas Ecosia displays everything. I e-mailed them and suggested to make an option to search by exact image size (for instance, if you enter 1920x1080, to get all images with these dimensions) and they approved the idea. If anything, Ecosia seems to be more open to ideas and suggestions than Google, which is another reason for me to prefer Ecosia.

[@jellifygirl]

I use Ecosia on mobile and definitely noticed this kind of thing. I'll search something like, uhhh idk. "blue cherries on a table" and the image results will just be normal ass cherries or a blue table. It tends to ignore things in complex or longer queries, the image results are especially bad, and it shows up with Nothing a lot more than G does. Now I just use it to go to specific websites I already know the keywords for, or search for simple stuff, and beyond that it's not really possible lol

[@PapasFilms]

I was kinda surprised that ecosia is a safari search engine option and startpage isn’t. That made the choice for me 🤣

[@seren5417]

if ur using macbook is privacy really a concern?

[@PapasFilms]

@@seren5417 I don’t have the money for a MacBook. I have an iPhone though and safari just works better.

[@PhillipLemmon]

I'm an AVID brave user! I like the fact that I can "get paid" to use it and surf the net. ALSO I like the fact that I can watch KZbin without ads.i think it's great...

[@ianphillips7778]

I've been using "your final choice" for a year or two and it's been good with English, German and image searches.

[@Wolficefang]

I've switched to YaCy recently. It claims to be a web crawler that runs on your own PC and it gets peer-to-peer results from other PCs. I'm not enough of a programmer to know how it works. I love it when it works, but that's rare. You have to manually tell it what websites to crawl. This means, unless a peer gives you the correct results (this is unlikely) you basically have to use a different search engine. There's also the fact that I don't have YaCy set to auto start on my system, so whenever I reboot I'll be without a search engine. But on the flip side, the ability to crawl specific sites is super useful because you kind of know what you'll get when you search. On a more technical note, it can be annoying when the ten top search results stem from the same website because that website wrote 10 similar articles on the topic you want to learn about.

[@gospodnchovek]

DDG has shitty results even in English. Brave search keeps surprising me how good it is.

[@hotstovejer]

This is why I've set up several instances of searxng in Docker. One for pedestrian traffic, and one behind a VPN Docker so I can search things without my IP being mine.

[@b_uppy]

Is docker a search engine?

[@hotstovejer]

@@b_uppy Docker is a way to run very small programs independent of an OS.

[@iodreamify]

Thank you Nick, I can only appreciate your in-depth impartial analysis. It's pretty rare these days. I still prefer google because i need the precision for IT related queries but i appreciate your effort.

[@morta5788]

Did you forget about the Qwant search engine?

[@kertrix_]

Hi Nick! Could you make a video of the best password managers, please? Thank you so much! Anyway, the video was so cool, as always!

[@n.miller907]

Over many years I've tried several password managers and I've stuck with KeePass. My strategy is to avoid having my passwords stored on a server somewhere without any control over the data. Instead, I install KeePass on my cellphone. The data file on the phone is what I consider my "master file". I manually copy that file onto my various Linux computers and place a copy onto my cloud service in case it all gets destroyed in a fire. Having to update my computer's copy every once in awhile isn't difficult. I just plug in my phone to the computer, open a Linux file manager and copy over the master copy every few months. I've used this method for well over a decade and never had any problems retrieving my passwords using KeePass.

[@drlukewhite]

Many thanks for the upload, I've been waiting for this one!!

[@GabrielM01]

Ive been using brave search for a while, and i like it very much, i think its one of the only search engines that can go against google in terms of fast searches, like the ones you dont even open any results you just look at what information they think its relevant, apart from programming questions any other things i search there it can find it pretty easily

[@nosotrosloslobosestamosreg4115]

Hey, Nick, yandex is pretty good search engine, it saved me many times while looking for technical solutions

[@MaloryHovell]

I did not even imagine that yandex used outside of russia.

[@TheLinuxEXP]

It's Googlle, but in Russia, all you do goes straight back to them, and probably the Russian government

[@solidhyrax]

@@TheLinuxEXP You could have just mentioned that in the video.

[@2EXTREME2008]

@@TheLinuxEXP it took me WAY too long to find this explanation. I still appreciate the video nonetheless, but i was genuinely really confused as to why you skipped yandex so quickly Now im curious about a video from you talking about yandex

[@Gaius__]

@@solidhyrax There is a need to mention that every Russian and Chinese company reports to their respective government?

[@yashchirka4060]

I use firefox and startpage (because they mostly mirror google results). works fine👌

[@awolsam]

I wish they would add a dark mode to Ecosia

[@MegaManNeo]

Ecosia is a really nice search engine, I set it up for everyone I handle the computer for. Personally, I actually set up a searXNG docker on a Pi 2 which of course isn't that fast but as casually as I search for something these days, it's alright.

[@madthumbs1564]

They seem to censor the same as others. Yandex is the only one I trust for results on suppressed topics / information so far, but their captchas are too annoying to use as a main search engine.

[@MegaManNeo]

@@madthumbs1564 isn't Yandex Chinese?

[@telegraph5592]

@@MegaManNeo No, its russian.

[@MegaManNeo]

@@telegraph5592 Doesn't necessary makes it better. Not that US services are free of shame but eh...

[@phoenamandre]

Hi there ! Good video :) About the ecological point of ecosia I'm a bit skeptical about all the plant trees initiative. It has been reported that many organizations buy fields from people that then buy parts of forests to grow crops, so.... And I'd like to remind that solar energy is not more ecological than nuclear, not in many aspects, I don't think that's enough to make a choice I've used Ecosia a lot and it's nice I also use Qwant sometimes

[@northof-62]

Thanks a lot Merci beaucoup for presenting Ecosia to us. The Vivaldi browser has it in their search engine list but I never bothered to try it out. Now thanks to you I have set it as my default.

[@kamratsmusiccorner3646]

Yeah I don't know what happened to DDG, their results used to be good but it's been steadily getting worse these last few years, I switched over to Startpage a couple of months ago and I like it a lot better, I'll check out Ecosia as well since I hadn't heard about them before this video.

[@shreyashsharma8498]

Brave has created there own fully fledged functional enviroment it's really comfortable

[@madthumbs1564]

Plus they make it easy to help fund hate and other ridiculous religious dark ages crap.

[@fgsaramago]

@@madthumbs1564 it was in the dark ages that people were "cancelled" for their beliefs....

[@needsLITHIUM]

I've been using Ecosia for a while. Like, since before I knew your channel existed, which I'm pretty sure I subscribed in 2014 or so. I found out about Ecosia when it was announced in 2009, and after looking into it and making sure it wasn't a passing thing and would stick around, I started using it in late 2010 or early 2011. I still sometimes hop back to Google or Brave search every now and then, the latter when using the browser. My browser of choice on all platforms is Vivaldi, but sometimes I setup Brave or Falkon for amnesiac usage or for separation of info for others using my computer.

[@joeykickassery]

I'm not a native english speaker, but it never occurred to me that the quality of search results in a language other than english was also an important metric to keep track of.

[@fgsaramago]

Itspretty crucial. ForPortuguese basically only google and by extension startpage will give good results, everything else is awful

[@MisterConscio]

Ecosia is nice, but there is no dark theme, i know i can handle this with extensions, but it would be nice to have this feature.

[@freeeeplay]

I think they said they were working on it so it might be a thing in the future

[@Caution40404]

They added a theme option now!

[@peteryates308]

I switched from Google to Kagi about eight months ago. Ultra private, great results (I've only tested in English) and some programming-centric features. I'd recommend giving it a try.

[@michalewandowski9080]

Does it have its own engine or is it using Google/bing engines? I've read somewhere that mojeek is the only independent search engine.

[@peteryates308]

@@Rivanni I'm more than willing to pay for ad-free search. If you're happy seeing ads and sponsored results or receiving poor results and a slow service like the ones featured here, then you do you.

[@DilbertCronicles]

"I'm shallow but NOT Instagram Influencer Shallow" LOL

[@yanlucasdf]

One thing I don't like much about brave search is video search, it dosent link well to videos I wanna see on KZbin as well as the Google engine link to the Google video service,but that's what happen when you try to degoogle... Other than that only thing I don't use brave search for is reverse image search, yandex is king in this department, can even find a Anime from a frame someone badly crop to make a meme on Twitter

[@davidsandrock7826]

That's why I've never seriously tried to degoogle. Google search results have been head and shoulders above their competitors for as long as I have been on the internet.

[@RogueRen]

OK so it WASN'T just me when I got e spot and realized it was slow

[@b_uppy]

E spot is a search engine or what?

[@RogueRen]

@@b_uppy its Murena's build of Searx that comes with their /e/ OS phones

[@Beryesa.]

Tbh, I would rather feed the independent brave index for the future, not bing. But eh, the company is a little weird for an open product. Not that Mozilla is any better but well I'm stuck with Google for any non-english search anyway. At least brave has enough of the normie people to enhance its search in other languages in the future. And nice enough interface to convince people, which was the first point people dislike ddg here. In a nutshell, I can imagine myself suggesting brave search to my friends which is absolutely not the case for ddg.

[@robonator2945]

maybe I'm missing something but I don't see how the company is a "little weird" tbh. The only crypto adoption I've heard is BAT, which isn't some gimmick or scam, it's a way to directly support creators in a privacy respecting way that can't be censored or controlled. Crypto is just a good tool, but just like a tool, jackasses can use it for bad things.

[@lunarna]

@@robonator2945 the ceo created a chromium-based browser in response to being pretty much forced out from mozilla for being homophobic. it's sketchy regardless of what you think of crypto

[@darkmaro12345]

@@lunarnawho was forced out?

[@Emancipatriot]

Thorium is far better.. in my opinion, of course.

[@AZthemute]

Glad to see another ecosia user, thanks for the entertaining and informative videos!

[@Electrodexify]

Ecosia is not private or days so on their terms that they hand off to Bing and then they anonymity after a week....

[@myoung7055]

Hi Nick, Firstly, your Yandex 'review' had me laughing out loud! Regarding Brave Search, I understand your gut concern, but I think the fact the company is so invested in crypto actually fits with its overall brand: 1) It uses crypto to give back to creators and websites, which was the original idea of the Brave Rewards programme. It was a way around sites losing revenue due to its then slightly controversial decision to include a built in ad-blocker within the browser, this was back in early 2016. 2) It also allows Brave to raise enough revenue to remain open source and independent. The alternative would be rely on community donations or sell your data. 4) Crypto and privacy kind of go hand in hand. It offers an alternative and generally more secure way to make purchases or investments and is often seen as a way to avoid being tracked or profiled. It would make sense then that a privacy focused browser would build its revenue around crypto. 3) If you don't like crypto the user can of course disable BAT and its rewards system entirely, so the crypto features are entirely optional. So it does not force this feature down users throats. I only bring this up as it is a shame to write Brave off entirely just because it is involved in crypto. Brave it not perfect but it has shown a lot of good will towards the privacy and Linux communities over the years and they are really driving new features (especially now they have picked up momentum in adoption) and pushing the industry in a good direction. I think some of Firefox's recent changes for the better (regarding security and tracking) could be attributed to the Brave Browser. Brave search in particular is perhaps the only viable alternative that does not rely on either Bing or Google for its results. That matters a lot as it means it is the only company not dependent on Google or Bing and on whatever they decide to do with their search results going forward.

[@TheLinuxEXP]

I really have a strong aversion to crypto and don't want to encourage companies that use it :)

[@chemislife]

​@@TheLinuxEXP where did the crypto touch you to have a fanboy level of hate against it? I don't particularly care about crypto but I'm not going to hate a company that is using it as an option. Companies like Newegg and I think Amazon accepts crypto as well. Would you boycott them as well just for that?

[@b_uppy]

@@chemislife I am curious as well. It's not like I'm buying Crypto myself. Maybe if they used more than Crypto to fund themselves???

[@chemislife]

@@b_uppy should we tell him that NVIDIA and AMD both catered to the crypto market during the boon and made sizeable profits off it? By his statement he would have to stop buying graphics cards or else he would be endorsing companies who promote crypto....

[@lorenzorossi2000]

I agree with TLE, crypto is 60% scams, 40% energy waste and 80% marketing garbage, if a company uses it I'll try to avoid them like the plague.

[@majzhemertvyj.6616]

3:15 hm, this is actually why duckduckgo got my respect. If you not blocking this kind of information, you gonna end like their country: in total poor and brainwashed. That's why they share fake and manipulative news as much as possible, if someone doesn't know.

[@peq42_]

Ecosia is undoubtly the best one, considering its not just private, but also plants trees

[@Winnetou17]

There's something that irks me about companies that make a product or provide a service but they also automatically do something good or eco in it, totally unrelated. It's like virtue signaling trying to conceal having a weaker product/service. Like, I remember several years ago, there was this chocolate that said that every chocolate bar bought meant some donation towards planting trees or something like that, cannot remember exactly. The thing is... say, I might be in financial problems. How about you give me that chocolate cheaper, without the extra money you give to the tree planting and when I can and I want, I'll donate to a tree-planting firm directly. Which is also much easier to track that it's actually doing something with the money, unlike the chocolate firm, who might very well send only half of the extra money, and pocket the rest, practically benefiting from the eco-friendly marketing, from the emotional weakness of the buyer. It might not, but... why have all this hassle ? The same with ecosia. I'd rather that they advertise less or improve their product with the extra money they have, not plant trees. On a side note, I don't think there's a limit of what you can spend when having a search engine, even if it's just an aggregator. Getting back, don't bundle up two totally unrelated things in one. I might only want one. You know, like the UNIX philosophy thing: "do one thing and do it well". Be the best search engine you can, let me decide when and how much and where to spend on tree plantings and everything else like that, don't force it on me.

[@b_uppy]

Yeah like 'let me plant a tree on my tree plantation' that I can profit off of even further in a few years. Good point.

[@WildVoltorb]

Exactly my thoughts! Give me the good results and let me do the tree planting lol. C'mon, there's no way of even checking if they are actually planting trees or not. That's such a disgusting cynical thing, I don't know how people even fall into that

[@lnklnx]

I've been happy with Neeva, and I'm a little surprised you didn't cover it. Makes me wonder if it has a negative I didn't see.

[@TheLinuxEXP]

I never heard about it!

[@dondep]

@@TheLinuxEXP I too just learned of it in the video before this video automatically came up, but while I'm here Nick, why didn't you explain your issues with Yandex? I just started using them and other than having a handful of Russian-language results sprinkled in, it doesn't seem half-bad. Should I be worried?

[@Gaius__]

@@dondep It's a Russian company. What else do you need to know about them?

[@gabsriel]

I do not trust Bing at all. I would go for Brave until a scandal pops up.

[@Electrodexify]

Yet Nick does not provide a full reason why he hates the company.

[@texaslinux]

Kagi is outstanding, I've used it exclusively for several months now

[@RavenThePlayer]

Presearch has been the best balance between quality and privacy for me. Quick links for other engines if it doesn't cut it, as well.

[@Electrodexify]

It's also decentralized by allowing anyone to self-host and earn crypto.

[@linus.]

You really missed Qwant. Relatively good and independent.

[@derram0k]

>Propaganda websites Well, alrighty then. No bias here.

[@TheLinuxEXP]

Website that report flagrant fake news are propaganda

[@derram0k]

@@TheLinuxEXP Except that's not all that was deranked, and you know that. It is a very convenient excuse, tho, because then you can just pretend it's "the bad guys." And when will this be applied to American media outlets, who operate under the assumption that if they all make a flagrantly false claim it becomes truth?

[@Abishek_Muthian]

I've been trying to validate an idea of creating a 'Search Engine Wall of Shame' where people can submit their poor results from search queries for actionable outcome from search engines. So far, It's only me who have been posting to it.

[@shadespear]

Changed to Ecosia today! I gotta say it feels pretty great actually KNOWING what options I have for search engines aside from the Big Well-Known Ones! Cheers, mate!

[@ottergauze]

I think SystemOne is completely aware that most of their users are huge privacy advocates. Regardless of what they deem profitable, StartPage will blow up in their face if they step out of line and news will travel fast, simply because of its target audience.

[@eduard_soul]

Incroyable je viens seulement de réaliser que tu étais français ou que tu parlais juste français alors que j'ai regardé pleins de tes videos, J'ai ressentis la meme chose en utilisant DuckDuckGo, les résultats pas foufou en tant que dev sur Linux Je pense que je vais rester sur Google pour l'instant, ou au moins réessayer Brave Search, pas grand chose qui donne envie en plus globalement sur les autres moteurs, C'est infiniment genial ce que tu fais, merci pour ton travail

[@richardshalla]

Thank you for all your efforts. I am grateful for the heads up on startpage. I moved to it as it was Google without Google but if an advertising agency bought it I'm out. Their interests and my interests do not align.

[@louaguado995]

What's the big deal with brave? 🤷‍♂️ I've always liked their results

[@simimik.]

Brave is the best. Founded by the founder of Firefox.

[@beastguy44ruleroftheuniver76]

@@simimik. whom is a huge homophobe

[@Blueeeeeee]

I'd like to hear your opinion on Qwant, too !

[@deersakamoto2167]

I also left DDG and now use both Brave (for regular search) & Yandex (for kinds of things that are often censored in the west)

[@averagemamil4523]

Good points and thoughtful vid 👍, but I’ll stick with Brave for the moment

[@Truckngirl]

Imagine! A search engine that complies results from multiple other search engines! What a great idea! So innovative! So....oh, wait; Dogpile, launched November 1996.

[@gunkymcsplunky]

Thanks for introducing me to Startpage! I’ve recently started using it today and have been really enjoying the privacy but brilliant results!

[@wyfyj]

DDG just seems like the results for me have sucked recently. Like nothing close to what I wanted 10% of the time.