stevegamer4235

Linux user (he/him) ASCII art from Linux program "Meow" by PixelSergey

[stevegamer4235]

I use void linux btw

[stevegamer4235]

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[stevegamer4235]

I figure with Google becoming utter garbage in recent times, people are probably trying out alternative search engines, but not many people seem to realize that there are a lot more options than simply using DuckDuckGo. I personally have used a lot of search engines before settling on my current one, so I figured I should make a little guide to help people looking to try something new!

Please note that I will only be covering search engines that I have actually used personally enough to confidently recommend, which means I will unfortunately have to leave out search engines like Brave Search. I also highly recommend doing more research than trusting some random tumblr user to be 100% accurate about everything on here. Research is what search engines are made for, after all!

DuckDuckGo: This is probably the most well-known google/bing alternative, and I admittedly don't have much to say about it. It's definitely the most easy to use choice, with it basically just being bing with a toggle for the AI slop and letting you replace the "www" in the URL with "noai" to remove any AI features by default. I'm still a bit hesitant to call it private since I've heard people suggest it might have some microsoft trackers now, but I failed to find anything definitive to prove this. If anyone else can figure out whether those claims are true or not, please let me know! Also, it's a bit odd that they use Apple Maps over something like OpenStreetMap.

StartPage: This is the one I'm personally using at the time of writing. This one uses OpenStreetMap for the map service, which I mentioned earlier, and it has pretty good results. It notably does not have an AI overview by default, and I'm not even sure if that's really a thing it does. The only AI stuff is hidden in the menu bar on the side which is closed by default, so you really have to go out of your way to use that. I highly recommend reading through the privacy policy for yourself if you wish to use this. The nice thing about this service is that the privacy policy is short and simple, so it's a very quick read that makes it clear how they handle your data. StartPage does have some notable flaws though. The news search barely has any results, and the image search isn't always the best, so it might be a good idea to try using a seperate search engine alongside this one for image/news searches.

Qwant: This is another good pick. I used this for a while until I got confident enough with startpage to use that as my primary engine. An interesting thing about this search engine is that they have a sponsorship with Murena, the creators of the privacy-focused Android fork known as /e/OS. This sponsorship spawned its own version of the Qwant engine which you can access by replacing the "www" in the normal url with "murena", and it's almost the exact same as the normal page with the exception of having no AI features. The only issue I ever faced with Qwant is that it lacks a proper map search, but you can always just use OpenStreetMap directly if you need to do a private map service.

SearXNG: This one is a bit different from all the prior ones. SearXNG is an open source search engine made for anyone to host. It can index a variety of search services (google, bing, etc.) while privatizing your data before sending it. Most importantly, the only ways to use it are to either find a good "instance" of it online using this list or by installing and configuring it onto your own system to run it locally. Since it is very customizable, that may mean that you will need to mess with the default settings for the services it indexes if you want the results to be more consistent with what you're used to unless the instance you choose already has good defaults. It also has a weird issue where it sometimes gets blocked by the search providers, so you may need to try refreshing a few times to get the search to work right at times. This is most likely the result of it anonymizing you before sending requests, which could make you appear similar to a bot to the services.

That's all I have. I hope this helps someone with moving away from Google. It may take time to adjust to using a new search engine with a potentially different algorithm, but I promise it's more than possible to do! Also, please remember that you do not need to restrict yourself to a single search engine. Experiment, try new ones, and see what setup works best for you!

[stevegamer4235]

here's your reminder to make sure you have a decent swap partition if you don't have a lot of ram and ever want to compile something from source on Linux. I had to make a 20GiB swap partition to make up for my laptop only having ~13GiB of ram, and while compiling LibreWolf (since void doesn't package it), I peaked at around 13GiB of ram (basically max) + 11GiB of swap usage. I tried to only do 4GiB of swap, but it kept fully crashing my system when I tried to compile LibreWolf even when I tried to limit how much it used.

[stevegamer4235]

since I post a lot about Linux and coding and whatnot, I suppose I should make a quick post to clarify that I do not and will not support the use of genAI for anything. I obv don't rly blame some people for using it when it's crammed down everyone's throats nowadays, but I personally just do not like using genAI at all. It feels gross to me.

I actually left google for other search engines that give the option to remove the AI garbage aswell. I'm currently using startpage, though you should do your own research for what one you'd like. I might make a post on some good options if people would like to see that.

[stevegamer4235]

am I reaching

(source: "Causing chaos and confusion in Among Us VR" by CHRBRG on youtube)

[stevegamer4235]

just learned about vimium C and it's so peak!! I can just use vim bindings to navigate websites in librewolf so I don't need to use my janky touchpad or reach to the touchscreen on my laptop.

also I like how you have to type out a 1-2 letter code in link select mode to click the right thing like some sort of quick time event lol

[stevegamer4235]

I love trying to compile something manually and always getting an error that takes forever to debug.

[stevegamer4235]

I think the best part about Linux is that it actually makes it easy to learn more about how your system works, and it makes it actually fun to learn about. I've learned more about operating systems in the past 6 months I've spent on Linux than I did during all of the 7 years I spent with W*ndows.

[stevegamer4235]

I use Alpine btw

[stevegamer4235]

who needs a dedicated alarm program when you can code one yourself in like two minutes with bash?

[stevegamer4235]

I use Gentoo btw

[stevegamer4235]

I use Artix btw

[stevegamer4235]

man the ads on Tumblr can be annoying... If only the Revanced Manager for Android on the Revanced GitHub page could patch the Tumblr v37.6.0.110 APK file on apkmirror… If only….

[stevegamer4235]

For those who were curious about the difference between normal uBlock Origins and the lite version for chromium browsers...

I enabled all the built-in filters for these aside from the ones under regions/languages. There's a lot more features than I realized before checking for this, including cookie notice blockers, social widgets, "annoyances" (ai suggestions, chat widgets, newsletter notices, etc.), malicious URL blocklists, even anti-Facebook(???)

A few of these, notably 7/10 of the ones under "annoyances", are still available for the lite version, but it still clearly pales in comparison, and I noticed that it's missing a lot of useful features like custom rules, and things like the custom filters are a lot simpler over on Lite (see below)

As for the why, the official website states:

I'd get Librewolf if you haven't already. It has normal uBlock Origins out of the box, and it's basically just Firefox but most of the privacy features are enabled by default and the recent AI stuff is removed.

(also, note for those who get it, disable "Delete cookies and site data when LibreWolf is closed" under privacy to stay signed in on websites)

[stevegamer4235]

I use Arch btw