I’m curious what people are using as their default search engine in Tor Browser. If you have a few seconds, vote for the search engine you have set as your default in about:preferences#search via the poll below.
(Hint: if you’ve never changed it, it’s probably still DuckDuckGo)
If you’ve added a custom search engine to Tor Browser manually and set it as your default, please select “Other” and leave a comment to let us know what you’re using instead.
Lastly, if you regularly use search shortcuts that are different from your default search engine, I’m super curious to know what those are too. See Search with the address bar if you’re not sure what this means.
A lot of people across the web have been complaining there isn’t any search engine which supports “Javascript completely disabled” configurations. Well, that’s not true, the DDG .onion link above, with the “/html” part at the end works.
I have found another search engine .onion which works with JS completely disabled, and that is the Brave Search .onion:
FWIW, I do not use, nor have I ever used the Brave web browser, or any other product or service from Brave (or whatever company name may be behind it) aside from their search. I have not used Brave Search .onion enough to form an opinion.
Another which has an .onion option is MetaGer. However, I removed the clearnet & .onion links to it from this post as the last time I visited it it appeared to have some odd type of “remove advertisement(s)” from some links. For me, ads and any “key” they may offer to remove ads is something I just can’t use and/or recommend.
Please take these links as suggested options and not with any special recommendations from me.
Thanks, @donuts, for the poll and the thread and thank you @championquizzer for the thread pin.
[1] Javascript completely disabled: within the browser (in about:config javascript.enabled toggled to false) and in NoScript (manually disabled every TB launch, deselect the checked boxes in NoScript’s “options” under General → “Preset customization” → only the boxes within DEFAULT and UNTRUSTED) and you’ve set the browser Security Level to “Safest”.
I started using Startpage just to test it out, after using DDG as my default for several years. I think I might make the switch permanent. I found myself shifting my DDG searches to Google semi-frequently using their !bang redirects, and with Startpage I’m just finding what I need on the first try more regularly.
I found Startpage to have good search results but a broken user interface; setting search language and result language to English has no effect and all results are returned in the language of the IP country.
I’ve been using SearXNG metasearch for some time now, on my own virtual server. In my opinion, the big advantage here is that I can access several search engines and every website only sees the IP of my server. In order to prevent a profile from being created for my server IP, friends and acquaintances also have access to my search engine.
