My article about 4Get, a privacy respecting search engine frontend, has been published in Linux Magazine #291. As you may already be aware, I frown on modern mainstream search engines and I am always looking for alternatives. The task seems impossible at times, but privacy conscious users don’t have to surrender without a fight.
4Get is quite similar to SearXNG, if you happen to be familiar with it. If not, I will tell you it is a web service you (or a trusted party) hosts that is able to relay your search queries to other search engines. The idea is you can perform your searches on your favourite 4Get instance, and this instance will query regular search engines (such as Google or Yandex) on your behalf. The benefit is that the mainstream search engines don’t get to associate your queries with your identity directly. Another big benefit is that, if you are performing a search for which a search engine can’t find an answer, 4Get facilitates getting results from multiple search engines in order to maximize the probabilities of scoring a good answer.