MetaGer is a metasearch engine focused on protecting users’ privacy. Based in Germany, and hosted as a cooperation between the German NGO ‘SUMA-EV - Association for Free Access to Knowledge’ and the University of Hannover, the system is built on 24 small-scale web crawlers under MetaGer’s own control. In September 2013, MetaGer launched MetaGer.net, an English-language version of their search engine.
Source: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer
It currently supports the following languages/regions:
Dansk (Danmark)
Deutsch (Österreich/Schweiz/Deutschland)
English (Great Britain/Ireland/Malaysia/USA)
Español (España/México)
Suomalainen (Suomi)
Français (Canada/France)
Italiano (Italia)
Nederlands (Nederland)
Polski (Polska)
Svenska (Sverige)
Source: metager.org/lang
There is a TOR-hidden service too:
It is open source:
gitlab.metager.de/open-source/MetaGer
And has other useful features, for example:
[…] you can hide yourself behind our proxyserver just by opening the result anonymously? Use “OPEN ANONYMOUSLY”; this also affects the following links.
Source: metager.org/tips
Alternatively I use some SearxNG-instances, preferably hosted in the EU:
Cris_Color@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Brave uses its own index. It used to be supplemented with results from other engines but I believe they have now phased that out.
Brave is the best of the free options in my experience, and it supports “bangs” which let’s you send your querry to a different engine (typing “how far is it to the sun !g” will pass the search to google. Duckduckgo also supports bangs), this is especially helpful for image searches (!gi for google images) since braves image search sucks dogshit 😅
Quant seemed like the second best free option in my experience. Some people don’t like brave as a company for various reasons, so quant may be a good option for those folks. Its my understanding that Mozilla has worked with quant in some way, which is kinda neat.
Both have their own index making them a sustainable/viable option going forward, where meta search engines that use other engine’s results are at the whim of those they fetch the results from (but may provide better results by piggybacking off a larger successful engine)
Driveway4964@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Thank you for the corrections! I’ve updated the post. I agree that Brave search had the best results/UX. As you mentioned, I have my own moral qualms with brave as a company.
Cris_Color@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
You’re very welcome, thanks for your initial post laying out a bunch of the options for folks to think about ☺️
Hope you have a good one!