Non-Interaction With Google Search. Why Your Next Search Engine Should Be SearXNG.
In the United States, the major tech companies all spy on their users and just hand the data over to the government. Sometimes a warrant is involved, but when it is, the Constitution is increasingly seen as little more than a formality, and the tech companies almost never fight being served and often hand over more data than the warrant even asks for.
That’s why I’ve stopped using Google Search. DuckDuckGo tracks you too.
(It’s hosted on Microsoft Azure, it queries Microsoft Bing, there’s tracking code in the improving duckduckgo script, and they encourage you to talk about your privacy with friends……..on Facebook! They even provide a link to Facebook.)
Basically, the more a tech company claims not to track you, the more they actually track you. Mac OS reports more data about its users to Apple than Windows does to Microsoft, although they are both bad. Apple even bypasses your VPN so they know exactly where you are when the reports are sent.
But search engines know a lot about you because you’ll type in a lot of embarrassing things that could be evidence of criminal activity. Basically everything you can do in America is some sort of an offense if you twist the law enough and if that sounds paranoid, abortion is illegal in half the country now and State prosecutors are increasingly turning to corporate search engines and Facebook to prosecute their victims.
Switching to a non-US hosted SearXNG instance, like Searx Belgium, or better, hosting your own and routing it through the Tor network (or simply through your VPN server), limits what these search engines can gather about you.
Unless you type in personally identifying information, they never know who is making the search. And that’s good because, increasingly, Americans live in a fascist police state that doesn’t even pay lip service to rights and freedoms anymore.
“We can prosecute you based on your Google History, wholesale.”
20 years ago, they bothered to give it lip service, now if for whatever reason they can’t get a warrant, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, or whoever will just SELL it to them.
(And GET RID OF THE “SOCIAL” APPS! WhatsApp, which is Facebook, is like having to listen to the cigarette companies talking about a “safer way to smoke” for 20 years.)
Since it’s easy to set a search engine in any Firefox-type browser, just use SearX. You can even set it like I do, to query Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Google, and Brave, so that even if some rate limit the instance, you still get results.
One of the things I also don’t miss about corporate search engines is those damned “AI” boxes that answer your questions wrong and take half the screen, and how the entire first page would be advertisements without an ad blocker.
In Chromium browsers, it’s a matter of time before Google cripples the ad blockers to where they can’t block these “sponsored” links. But SearXNG doesn’t have to send them to your browser in the first place.
I have a very amnesiac browser. On top of the SeaMonkey I have a little bit rigged to make trackers more difficult, I set LibreWolf to more secure settings than it even comes with. Nobody is allowed to use Widevine DRM or WASMs, and the browser doesn’t even keep a history while I’m using it (default is to dump it on exit). I route it through my VPN. That way I’m basically in private browsing mode plus the mods plus ubo and NoScript blocking ads, trackers, and nuisances, and malware sites.
This is all on top of my VPN, which I browse through the European servers, over Wireguard, with ads, trackers, and malware sites blocked again at the DNS level.
Sometimes I use Tor Browser on the safer or safest settings, but only on the VPN, to make it harder for my ISP to realize it’s Tor traffic.
I don’t get a lot of interruptions anymore. I’ve extended the browser to load privacy proxies like piped instead of YouTube, or Old Reddit, which isn’t overflowing with dumpster fire code like the new one is. Old Reddit Redirect is in case I end up on Reddit somehow by clicking a Reddit link from the Gopher proxy for Reddit.
I have over 25 years experience hacking browsers up to be less shitty, and the job isn’t getting any easier.
I think one of my favorite things about KDE is it’s easy to to proper multi-tasking unlike GNOME, which is totally busted.
I think the worst part about dealing with programs on your computer is trying to hack them to get at something they’re not supposed to be able to do. But at least as long as they’re on your computer, hack away.
On the Android phone I took away the Google bar because it’s taking up a lot of real estate and designed to get you to interact with them without thinking about it. Searching Searx Belgium through Fennec F-Droid is totally doable.
On hacky stuff again…
Last night, get this…. Last night I was setting up an AAC encoder for foobar2000 in Wine, and the options (officially) are the one from Winamp 5.6x when AOL still owned it, or the one from iTunes (the Windows one), which Apple doesn’t ship anymore (I think.).
Given that Apple makes terrible code, never bothered to “properly” port any of it to Windows, and made a habit out of installing messes you didn’t want and then abandoning them to accumulate security vulnerabilities, I think I’ll take a hard pass on the iTunes even if I could hack something to death here.
I plucked fhgaac from Winamp 5.666.
It turns out you don’t even need the entire thing installed.
All you really need to do is unpack it in such a way that it at least installs the transcoder without all the other shit then grab libmp4v2.dll and enc_fhgaac.dll out of it and copy it to the foobar2000 “encoders” folder (in my case under the 64-bit Program Files in the WoW64 structure) and then install the free codec pack if you haven’t, for foobar2000, which includes the fhgaacenc.exe that uses the libraries.
I was toying around with it. It does produce acceptable results, but like everything Fraunhofer ever did there’s now another codec for AAC called FDK-AAC, so I’m going to look into implementing this too.
The reason you have to go grab an old AOL build to get the AAC encoder out is that the new owner of Winamp lost their license and isn’t going to pay to get it back, but they have it set so if you install the last AOL build, then clobber it with the new version, it won’t remove the AAC encoder that’s already there.
So far undoubtedly Opus 1.4 outperforms the FhG AAC encoder in quality, but FhG AAC is better than LAME MP3.
AAC never really got going in the open source world. If you run into files, it’s probably something someone made at home with a “pirate codec” or got out of iTunes.
Support for playing them in hardware is broad and nearly universal.
But Opus has a pretty big installed base. It is hardly obscure.
Even Windows can play them, to the point that Windows even matters now. Android “is the hardware” for many people, and you can just drop them on your phone. ⬆