Hi, I think I’m looking for a unicorn. I would like to use a search engine that does not alter results based on things like location data harvested from my IP or prior search keywords, but that only responds to deliberate input from the user (keywords and syntax).
The reason is I find it very disturbing how people can be influenced by results that target them. This became a great concern in my mind when I first [made the mistake of] trying Tik Tok for the first time. Before it had collected any data from me, it was clear that my location and the interests of people in this area were strongly influencing results, with most of the content being of the radical alt-right variety. While results from a typical search engine may not be so dramatically skewed, it’s still troubling that we may be influenced in some way by results tailored to appeal to us or to other users in our households / locales.
So far, these are the ones I’ve tried (I won’t even mention search engines like Bing and Google, because … obviously):
1. Qwant: This was my first hope since it promotes itself as “the search engine that doesn’t know anything about you.” Upon searching “restaurants in my area,” this bold claim was immediately disproven.
2. Startpage: I used this for a long time before I noticed that results were being altered. It was subtle. While Startpage does not appear to use location information from my IP, I happened to search a specific address while in another town, and the day after this I started noticing results that heavily skewed toward that location, so apparently it does change search results based on which keywords you’ve searched before, which is just as troubling. Add to this the fact that they are suspect in the first place, being a System1 product, and it makes me feel ill at ease.
3. SearXNG: So I realize there’s a lot of customization one can do within SearXNG, but so far the public instances I’ve tried have all clearly netted results that are location-based.
4. Kagi: I can’t really afford to use this, but I had heard good things about it, so I tried the free trial. It was immediately giving me results based on my location. I’d say it was just as bad as mainline search engines such as Google and Bing.
5. DuckDuckGo HTML: This was my most recent attempt at finding a search engine. I knew from experience that standard DuckDuckGo changed results based on location, but I had read some information that led me to believe the HTML version does not. Unfortunately, it does.
Does anyone know of any search engine I can try that only nets results based on my input without trying to think for me? I’m exhausted lol
Edit: I just thought of this, and now I’m curious. I don’t know much about how Tor works, but do search engines with .onion URLs yield results from the general internet, or only .onion sites?
Edit 2: This is … extremely odd. Simplified explanation: Tor connects you via a specific circuit of nodes, which you can see by clicking an icon next to the address bar. The last node it connects to is the exit node. But here’s the thing: Even the Tor edition of DDG insists on providing location-biased results that match the location of the exit node. I tested this by running a search on DDG and then connecting via a different circuit several times. Each time, the results were tailored to the location of the exit node. This is very disappointing. I’m going to do some searching and try some different search engines, but I think it’s safe to say I will not find what I’m looking for in any fork of DuckDuckGo, not even the .onion version.
Edit 3: https://wiby.me/ This … might be it. This looks promising!
Edit 4: https://searxng.no-logs.com/ Another one, possibly? It appears to provide a lot of results around Stockholm though, so maybe it’s not totally location-neutral. It’s easy enough to trick a search engine into thinking you’re at another location if that’s the goal, but the goal here is authentic results.
Edit 5: Someone pointed out to me that https://www.mojeek.com/ has a setting to search with “no location bias,” and so far it appears it does not alter results based on location. I’m going to try this for a while.
Every search engine will use your location. Especially when you make location based searches.
Do you think “restaurants in my area” should mean Earth? Or would you include the ISS also?
Ideally it should also include the restaurant at the end of the universe
How is that place still in business
A place like that relies on repeat customers
Any website you connect have access to your public IP for each request, hence location recommendations
This is true, and there are ways to obscure this such as using a VPN. However, my issue is not with the site seeing the IP, but rather with search engines providing biased results that are tailored to a specific location or user based on things like IP address or search history. They can snapshot my IP data, store it, and see it for all I care, but at the end of the day I want non-biased results from my search engine.
This is how search engines worked back in the 90s, so I know this is possible, and it seems like there must still be a search engine somewhere that provides this type of service.
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You’re right that searching “restaurants in my area” would not be a practical set of keywords to enter into a search engine that does not harvest location data. Instead, one would simply have to enter something specific, such as “restaurants in Edmonton” or wherever you are located at the time. However, I use this as a test to see if a search engine is altering results based on my location, which is concerning to me for the reasons I have explained above.
Every search engine will use your location
I’m looking for one that only responds to information that I deliberately input, so that if you and I both searched “anarcho-communism” (just for example), we would both see similar results, as opposed to me being more likely to see something biased toward agencies and trends in my area.
You use the word “harvest”. Which has a meaning along the lines of: Collect and save for later use. That’s not necessarily the case in your example though. Nothing needs to be collected or saved. It only needs the one IP, the one time that search is done, then it can be (and on most of your “tested” engines is) forgotten.
If you search for “restaurants in Edmonton”, you’ll likely receive exactly what you think.
If you search for “anarcho-communism” or something equally non-related to location. Than the IP won’t matter, beyond giving you results in your local language.A truly blind search, would generally suck. You’d need nearly half a dozen qualifiers to find some relevancy.
You’d need nearly half a dozen qualifiers to find some relevancy
Yes, this is what I want. Do you know of any search engines like this? Half a dozen sounds very fair. That’s like a second or two of typing.
That’s just a test though, to see if the search engine is using some form of tracking. If they searched for something like “news” or “hot milfs” they don’t want “hot milfs in your area”.
That isn’t tracking. That’s just using the IP the search came from to specify “my area”.
No one said it was tracking. Is using location as a search term without it being asked for. What OP is looking for is a search engine that would return different results for “restaurants” and “restaurants near [location]”
It is providing search results that are skewed toward trends and agencies in my location, so it is not a neutral or trustworthy search engine.
No search engine can be neutral, for the same reason that no news can be neutral.
People must decide what it will show you and if an algorithm decides, people must program the algorithm. All people are biased in some way.
True, but there is no requirement for a search engine to use such an algorithm to net results. I know this because I’ve been using search engines since the Windows 95 era. It’s possible to have what I seek. I’m just starting to question if anyone makes it.
I’m going to try the .onion version of DuckDuckGo later and see how that goes.
Update: This is … extremely odd. Simplified explanation: Tor connects you via a specific circuit of nodes, which you can see by clicking an icon next to the address bar. The last node it connects to is the exit node. But here’s the thing: Even the Tor edition of DDG insists on providing location-biased results that match the location of the exit node. I tested this by running a search on DDG and then connecting via a different circuit several times. Each time, the results were tailored to the location of the exit node. This is very disappointing. I’m going to do some searching and try some different search engines, but I think it’s safe to say I will not find what I’m looking for in any fork of DuckDuckGo, not even the .onion version.
Update 2: Ooops, I was using the clearnet version. I switched to the .onion version, which it turns out has to be done manually. I’m still getting very different results based on the exit node, although it’s much less obvious now. I’m thinking there might be some other .onion search engine that does what I need.
Not sure it will solve your problem, but if you’re not happy with the public SearXNG instances, you can run your own instance of SearXNG on your local machine, and even set up custom filters and redirects to get rid of SEO junk.
I’d be very interested in doing so! But I’m afraid my technical skills are severely limited. I’m willing to learn, but it’s going to be a steep curve for me. It’s the same reason I don’t self host here or host my own email. It’s something I’d like to learn, but it would not be easy!
If you want to give it a shot I would recommend you use Podman Desktop. What I did was I just followed the instructions from the SearXNG page until I had to run it. Afterwards I would just add it to Podman Desktop. Then enter the settings to set a localhost. You can use 8080 in the localhost setting. After that I would just press run and it would start. On firefox or whatever browser you want, now enter
localhost:8080in the search bar and you have your very own searxngThis is very helpful, thanks! Maybe it’s not as difficult as I had imagined.
Use something like tailscale if you want to easily and safely use it over the web (IP will then be 100.something something)
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I see you already have an answer using podman.
But don’t be afraid of the command line. If you can copy/paste a few commands, it’s pretty easy to set up.
I honestly find installing docker harder than to start a locally hosted searxng instance.
Also, something like self-hosting your own email is way harder and requires a lot more maintenance. I’d leave that project to further down the line.
Thank you! I’m starting to believe more that I can figure this out. The trick will be to find the right forums with reliable information vs. searching some random sites for commands. (Would be ironic if I did that after all this, eh? :P)
Duckduckgo has a toggle to disable location-based results though? You can also choose a different location if you want to.
Duckduckgo has a toggle to disable location-based results though?
Mainline DuckDuckGo? Care to tell me where that is? There’s an “all regions” option in settings, but it’s non-functional in that DDG will still provide location-based results, even in a private tab or another browser (I have Librewolf, Waterfox, and Firefox on my Windows PC for testing).
DuckDuckGo HTML on the other hand lacks such a setting, but it is much more subtle about changing results based on location. It was actually a fluke that I discovered this due to a technical problem I was having with the site’s interaction with Firefox.
This one. I haven’t tested it systematically but it works well enough for me. If I search just for ‘restaurants’, the map will use my location, but the regular search results are tripadvisor and opentable results for Chicago, Bronx, and Milwaukee, none of which are remotely close to me.
Edit: Just realised the marking wasn’t saved, but the toggle is right above the map.
That’s what I don’t want it to do, though. It may not appear at first that it is customizing other results based on location, but if it’s doing this, then it’s certain that your results are not location-neutral. For example, I’d be much more likely to see far-right extremism served to me by this search engine because of the political climate and existing institutions in the place where I live. I want something that does not use IP data at all to serve results, but only uses deliberate input. If I want to find restaurants in my town, I would have to search for “restaurants in [name of city] [name of state] [name of country]”
Keywords and syntax only, no locational customization of my results.
I think the map part is separate, the regular results didn’t take my IP into account from what I can tell. But I can’t guarantee that of course. Otherwise you could also check out mojeek. From their about page:
We act on our own agenda and not that of others, this is why we focus our time on one thing and one thing only - “No tracking. Just Search.” When you conduct a search on Mojeek, your results are based entirely on the keywords you typed in. Mojeek does not possess any previous identifying information on you, such as IP addresses, search history or click behaviour.
That sounds promising! I’ll try it.
I think Qwant is as close as you’re going to get unless you can set up searchxng to do what you are asking.
Now, you might be able to get better diversity in results if you use a vpn to move to more diverse or contrasting cities.
I often find news sources external to the US to be very interesting insights to what we see rammed down our throats.
Qwant is actually one of the worst offenders, in my experience. It even serves the results in a Googlesque style, and there’s no setting to change this. It also requires you to at least select a country, and it has advertising baked in. (There are links to sites I’ve never visited like Nike and Rakuten on its homepage.) I’m very much anti-Qwant at this point, based on what I’ve seen. I’m not sure why people like it. Maybe it’s better for people who don’t use uBlock Origin? I don’t know. It’s honestly perplexing.
It’s true that almost all of these will provide different results if I use a VPN, and I can and have, but then it’s the same problem – now I’m going to still see results targeted toward interests and agencies at that location instead of mine, which doesn’t really solve the problem of being manipulated by my own search engine. For instance, if I connect to Finland, I often receive actual results in Finnish from the search engines I’ve tested.
I do agree with you though that it’s sometimes useful at least to use a VPN to see different results, and I also find this interesting, but this really only highlights the problem with location-altered searches.
So many of the engines you mentioned by default geo-locate you for search relevancy, but you can turn that off. I believe Qwant, DDG, and Kagi all have configuration settings for that. Generally what you want is what is sometimes termed the “international” edition.
However, that being said, you’re never truly pulling search results from outside the anglosphere because you’re entering search terms in English.
I know you mean well, so have an upvote. It’s true there is a setting in DuckDuckGo to select a region, or to leave it set on “all regions.” Unfortunately, it is functionally useless since I’ve confirmed that it does provide data tailored to my IP. In fact, not just my IP, but the name of my exact county and home town. The HTML fork does not have such a setting, but it was only more subtle about providing location-tailored results. At the end of the day, I can’t rely on it.
Qwant doesn’t have such a setting, but at least it gets as general as “United States” (which would be fair enough for me – like you said, and it’s also occurred to me about searching in English – but searching English terms is also deliberate input from the user and would fall under the category of “keywords and syntax.”) However, Qwant does not simply provide US-based results, but actually targeted toward my exact location. I’m not aware of any setting in which I can change this. If you know of one, please let me know where to find it, because it’s not in the regular settings page.
Kagi is the same as Qwant, but with the addition of an “international” setting. Again, it is non-functional since it persists in providing very specific results to my location. In fact, Kagi is one of the worst I’ve tried so far. It even presents the results in a style reminiscent of Google, including starred reviews and all.
I find it ironic that I avoid toxic algorithms like the plague by not using Facebook or Twitter, yet I am seeing data manipulated by the very search engines I use every day. There’s got to be some obscure old-school search engine out there that works like they did in the 90s, right?
I just learned about kagi. It’s subscription-based but seems really nice
On one hand they are incentivized to not f-over their users. On the other hand, because you need a paid account it wouldn’t be as private as SearXNG-over-Tor or whatever.
I’ve heard good things about it. Unfortunately, it does not meet my criteria.
I think most people are looking for a “smart” search engine that just works. I want a dumb search engine that only responds to my input.
You Will NOT Find A Search Engine That Does Not Geo-Locate You. They DO NOT Exist.
Why am I so bold in my statement? Because they don’t exist. Please oh please try to prove me wrong, it will be very entertaining, and I promise I will find that every engine you recommend will be caught red-handed doing this by the time I complete 100 searches specifically crafted to bait this behavior out.
How do I know? Been accessing the public internet since 2004. They all have been doing so since then; and those who failed to do so have ceased to exist.
How do I evade it? Unfortunately, you don’t I recommend using either Tor; or a VPN. Then you’ll know what region and possibly city your accesses will appear from; and the blatantly localized results will be irrelevant to you.
But XYZ has an option!~ No, they do not. You will still receive data relevant to your language and country as determined by your IP Address’ Geo-Location. You can’t turn that off; and engines won’t give you the ability to ignore fine-grained IP location either if you ask for something local; which still localizes you to the city level.
Geo-Location is a core feature of all search engines. So good luck trying to avoid it.
Why are you asking me to “prove [you] wrong” when the entire premise of this post is to request help finding this? I’m not asking search engines not to see my IP or even not to store it, but not to use it to net unique results.
I disagree that it should be considered a core feature. In fact, in many ways it is antithetical to the concept of a search engine, which are intended to respond to deliberate input from the user, mainly in the form of keywords.
I have a hard time believing no such thing exists. Usenet still exists ffs, so certainly there’s got to be a basic search engine. I’m currently looking at https://wiby.me
But yeah, I’m not here to prove you wrong, nor am I interested in a debate about what constitutes “core features” in a search engine. I have a very specific thing I’m looking for, and I’ve expressed my reason for wanting this. Not sure what more you expect from me. If it doesn’t exist, then I guess I’ll find out, but that doesn’t seem likely to me.
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Nice. After work today, I plan to download Tor, and I’ll try these out! Iirc DDG is the default search engine in Tor, so that should be the first I try!
It will be a bit of a pain having to open Tor to search, but since it would just be for searching I don’t think it will be too complicated. Do you think there’s a way to set Tor to open clearnet links in normal Firefox? That would be ideal if I could search within Tor but open the links in my regular browser.
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Yeah true, but some sites do break in Tor. I’m not that concerned about some specific sites. I just want control over the choices that I make instead of having a search engine try to do the thinking for me.
I use DuckDuckGo and I have a little toggle button on the results page that lets me turn off location based results. If I clear cookies and forget to turn it back on my results for local stuff are hilariously bad. Not sure if they’re completely devoid of location info but it seemed like it to me coming from the other direction you are.
Depending on what you’re doing, Local LLM can help a bit. Like if i want a recipe for an apple pie i could use LLaMA-2 to find out even without an internet connection.
Not saying its a replacement for a search engine, i just think its worth mentioning.
(edit for grammar)
Yeah, that’s not exactly what I want, but this is still very useful information that I’m bookmarking so I can look more into this
