Content deleted by creator due to lemmy.ml tolerating brigades from hexbear

  • Steve@communick.newsEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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?

      • Steve@communick.newsEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • SomeoneShatMyPants@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      1 year ago

      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”.

  • Melody Fwygon@lemmy.oneEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • orizuru@lemmy.sdf.org
        0·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • uzay@infosec.pub
    0·
    1 year ago

    Duckduckgo has a toggle to disable location-based results though? You can also choose a different location if you want to.

      • uzay@infosec.pub
        0·
        1 year ago

        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. 367a7cda-a957-404b-ad9e-21e3d2c9b804

        Edit: Just realised the marking wasn’t saved, but the toggle is right above the map.

          • uzay@infosec.pub
            0·
            1 year ago

            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.

  • sciawp@lemm.ee
    0·
    1 year ago

    I just learned about kagi. It’s subscription-based but seems really nice

  • confusedwiseman@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • gibson@sopuli.xyz
    0·
    1 year ago

    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)