I am in the process of changing things on my PFSense Firewall, so previously I had all traffic running through a VPN, however with a work from home stance, maintaining that model became a little problematic/overly complex while maintaining the necessary level of network security. Especially since I started serving a number of world visible services in a DMZ. So until recently I was not concentrating on privacy aspects, and I was more interested in cutting out external services I might use, and self hosting them instead or employing paid services for certain items with providers I do trust or at least trust far more than the usual actors.
Next thing on my list is running squid proxy in ssl intercept mode with modified X-Forwarded-For headers. This should help cut down on the available information on my searx search requests by removing ip addresses and turning them into unknown, I will also be testing this completely removed headers, however this may cause breakages. I have also looked at setting up a remote elite or at least anonymous proxy, but that involves some overhead, and it is currently a backburner issue.
Overall for me security comes first, and privacy second. Ideally I try to find a balance. Running a local searx instance offers me additional control over what search engines are being used, and where the data generated is stored.
It’s safe, but it’s not focused on privacy. They will collect and store data.
And yes, Yandex is pretty good for image search and also for things that may be censored or downranked on other search engines.
Have you used it more extensively? Just asking out of curiosity. When it comes to politicts and such, I guess it may be an “alternative” source for the usual propaganda we are all subjected to in the western world.
Not really, it’s just massive propaganda / suppression of results related to internal politics from the Russian side, kinda like Chinese engines / tech.
What it’s really good for however - is searching content
If you want search engine at least somewhat balanced in politics - it simply doesn’t exist
Use aggregators like SearX, filter propaganda crap, check your sources…basically become an old-school journalist yourself.
No, I just use it rarely.
When it comes to politics, yes, you can use it if you wanna get a bigger picture. But, and I agree with @keybreak here, you have to keep in mind that it may be as biased as the western search engines, just the other way around;-)
But what I really meant is things like pirated media and software, things related to hacking/pentesting and generally stuff that is viewed as inappropriate in the western world.
A recent example: Someone on reddit was complaining that he can’t find certain minecraft hacks on either DDG and Google although he was able to find those some weeks ago. That’s when Yandex is recommended usually.
What got me a bit interested on yandex is that i read somewhere is that it has better reverse image search than google, not sure how true is that tho, i’ve been using google search lately, don’t use duckduckgo anymore
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