I've been trying to find a good privacy respecting browser, but I can't really decide on what to use. I don't like the search results with Brave Search. DuckDuckGo shares my information with Microsoft and SearchXNG shows me NSFW images even with strict search on. I really like Presearch, but I'm not really sure what they're about.
EDIT: After tinkering with the settings of my SearXNG instance, it seems to have reduced the amount of NSFW images. I think I will stick with SearXNG for now.
Does that not defeat the point, because then they can see that the searches are coming from your location/internet?
You can host if on a vps, use it behind a vpn, or make a whole group of people using it so you don't know from who these requests were
The vpn, sure, but if you host it on a vps (and don't make it public) then all of the requests are coming from the vps's ip. This is private, but not anonymous.
Even with a VPN I don't know if request are really that anonymous (anonimity is almost impossible to get)
I have started using a public instance because of this.
The problem is that you can't customize default settings
and they get rate limited often.
I host my searxng instance on a hetzner vps so my ip is not leaked anywhere.
Care to explain how?
The search requests are being made on my behalf on the host (in my case, the hetzner VPS).
But they are always coming from the same IP, so you are still identifiable. If you want increased anonymity you need more people to use your instance to mix the search topics.
I don't really care about anonymity much. Privacy != Anonymity.
It seems like some people use my searxng instance sometimes. It's not locked after all.
That changes things a lot.
k