I’m going to make a suggestion on the new best way to Search. It owes a lot to Luke Smith’s perspectives, but I’ll give you mine too.
In the earliest days of the Web the best thing going for this purpose was AltaVista, but by the turn of the century Google was much, much better than anyone else.
As the first decade wore on it became increasingly apparent that they’d pulled a 180 on the Don’t Be Evil thing, so myself and the rest of the tinfoil hat brigade cast about for alternatives. For a while, that meant Scroogle, a virulently anti-Googles one man show that was essentially a proxy middleman between them and you. But they kept fucking with him and eventually he got tired of the fight and shut down.
In the second decade the main choices were Ixquick/Startpage (brilliant; also basically a proxy) and DuckDuckGo, which was never as good at performing the basics of just search engineering.
DDG ads and billboards are everywhere now, and maybe they’re better at it than they used to be–I haven’t tested them rigorously of late. But the big marketing push gives me pause anyway. On the Startpage side, they sold out to some conglomerate with a bad privacy rep. Maybe they’re still not-evil, but again, there’s reason to be more wary than there used to be.
So now what?
I suggest Searx:
Currently when you head there, there’s a list of choices.
You won’t go too far wrong just picking the top choice, as in https://spot.ecloud.global/
per the screenshot.
But you mind find reasons to pick elsewise. The nibblehole dot com one, for example, will tend to give you more US-centric results than the Euro servers. I tend to favor instances with GNU in their names, for techno-political prejudices of my own. I would love to more often use https://search.privacytools.io … but I’ve found it kind of janky and incomplete.
None of that’s very important. The point is that you’ll be proxied out not just to Google, but to a bunch of engines–Searx is a metasearch, typically drawing from Bing and DDG and other places all at once. The proxy servers are run by individual admins and interested groups, and you can roll your own too, if you can afford the bandwidth to do so on the behalf of others. Plus:
“Hosting your own instance … may give you a more consistent search experience.”
But for general purposes using an open instance from the searx.space page will be fine, and let you search in reasonable trust and peace.
Of course you can amplify that by stacking services, like running a VPN, that protect you from potential rogue instances (and your own ISP) too. That’s what I do.
On a barely related note, I used the word ‘vairtere’ to test the efficiency of an instance.
https://searx.xyz/?q=vairtere&categories=general&language=en-US
This site doesn’t show, because I have it hidden currently from crawler robots, but the first hit gets it mainly right, and would bring you here anyway.
The more interesting thing is that some of the proxied search engines, finding barely anything for Vairtere proper, tried guessing what else I might mean, and universally decided that was:
Voiture
Which is the old French word for Vehicle. Voltaire would be proud of me maybe.