Running after search engines
I've moved recently from DuckDuckGo to searx. Due to the partnership with Yahoo, which is owned by Verizon, and the partnership with Canonical that adds a canonical referrer to the GET string, I can no longer trust DDG claims of privacy. And I'm old enough to have seen over and over again the same corporate behavioural pattern of baby steps towards an ever increasing loss of guarantees of privacy that go beyond mere claims.
Searx is a quasi-p2p search engine that can function either as a centralized search engine (which is the traditional way since WebCrawler) but also allows one to create their own search engine node. Currently I am using searx.me as my search engine. Which is a popular node for users of the search engine. Searx has all the features of modern search engines, it's is highly configurable (and searx.me doesn't hide those configurations from you) and I found no fault on its ranking system. But it is considerably slower than the other popular search engines. At least from my location.
I'd love to move to YaCy, a still rough-around-the-edges full peer network search engine. But the bandwidth requirements are too high for it to be a viable solution in my present location. However, I'm hopeful that P2P will eventually become the norm on web searching and that in 10 or 20 years the centralized and corporate-owned web search model will be a shadow of its glory (to business and no one else) money-machine days. YaCy will probably not make it happen. But the interest in p2p web crawlers has been increasing considerably due to the growing lack of trust among traditional web searching. Something that is bound to generate new solutions.
