Hello. I really like the idea of kicksecure-welcome-page. It’s very convenient to have buttons for different search engines. I think it would be excellent for convenience and privacy if you add the SearXNG search engine in the new update - according to many ratings, for example, https://searchengine.party, it is the most private and secure search engine. And it provides good search results. And you can also add the popular search engine Startpage, which can hide users’ IP.
Thank you for your work 
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Yes, that would be a very convenient solution, since firefox esr does not have startpage search by default. And https://searx.space/ is also very useful. It is very convenient to have such buttons at hand when launching browser.
And maybe it would be worth changing elephant pic to a darker one so that buttons at top and doc search are more contrasting and stand out better agains white clouds? Perhaps this way users will more often search for solutions to popular documented problems in documentation (visual memory will remember doc search on the homepage). Sorry if I am too picky about aesthetic. I love elephants and I greatly appreciate your fantastic work. All my friends are using Kicksecure now. Sometimes my friends (new users to Linux and Kicksecure) ask me about some problem. I tell them, “on browser’s homepage, there is a search for documentation, and it seems there is an instruction there to solve your problem”, and they respond “Yeah, right, I hadnt paid attention to this search before. It blends with background”
As for the search engine websites, I am inviting comments.
As for the style, our web developer will look into this.
Thank you for all your support!
Hello
Yes, please add Startpage button. I love Startpage and Kicksecure homepage. Its great to have arsenal of the best search engines on homepage - its faster and easier then bookmarks with different search engines. Many users hide bookmarks on startup tab.
Homepage background is too bright and hurts eyes when launching browser in the evening or at night - at night want to close page faster to save eyes. Maybe elephant at sunset? And you can add ‘functionality, reviews, cybersecurity manuals , solutions to known problems’ to doc search. Kicksecure documentation and wiki are very cool - its more than just technical documentation. There is a lot of unique info about cybersecurity and privacy. New users will not only see in browser where to look for error solutions, but they will also want to learn more about cybersecurity - perhaps they will change their views on many topics, as happened to me. In various chats users often ask where they can read in detail about cybersecurity and I recommend Kicksecure / Whonix wiki. Patrick, you’ve done an excellent job!
SearXNG looks neat as a project, but simply “adding the SearXNG search engine” is tricky since SearXNG itself is an open-source project, not a service. Individuals may run public SearXNG services, but in that instance if you use those services, you are trusting whoever runs them with the info you’d be entrusting Google with if you use their search engine. SearXNG’s documentation even warns:
Always use an instance which is operated by people you trust.
So the question then becomes what instance to trust. Personally I’m leery of personal instances because, well, we have no idea who’s running them. It could be a respectable privacy advocate who wants to do the world a favor, it might be the head of the intelligence agency of (insert a nation you dislike here). If an individual was very well-known in the open-source or privacy and security communities, and was able to sustainably run the search engine on their own, it would probably be fine, but otherwise, I’d steer clear there.
Company-run instances are a lot easier to trust ironically, because the entity behind them is known or at least more likely knowable. If they do something shady, it’s also more likely to become publicly known. The searchengine.party site linked by rico lists two company-run SearXNG instances, one run by /e/, and the other one ran by Disroot. Of the two, /e/ is known for selling smartphones with an outdated and probably insecure version of Android, among other security failures, so if I had to pick between them I’d probably trust Disroot a little more. Granted, I don’t necessarily think either of them are going to shuttle your data off to a large corporation, this is just my initial reaction looking at things.
My first impression of Startpage isn’t great:
- Looking at their home page, they claim to quote a few (presumably) high-profile people in the privacy space supporting them, including Edward Snowden, but with no links to the articles they’re (presumably) quoting.
- They’re owned by System1, an advertising company that, in their own words, “monetizes internet traffic by putting the right ads in front of the right people at the right time.” This is obviously more than a little worrying.
- Their search engine solution isn’t open-source, at least partially because they’re using intentionally proprietary anti-spam algorithms, which I guess is reasonable but still non-ideal.
- On the plus side, I didn’t see any third-party analytics links when looking through the client-side source code of the home page, so that was good.
Ultimately it seems like they’re making a bunch of claims you have to blindly trust, and some claims that, in a worst-case scenario, could technically be true while still leaving the platform privacy-invasive. (I.e., if they’re owned by an advertising company, they don’t exactly have to sell your data to monetize it. Just because they “block 3rd parties from accessing your personal data to target you”, doesn’t mean they can’t use your personal data to target you themselves.)
I took a look at the searchengine.party code, it looks reasonable at first glance, and the code deployed on the website itself is identical to the code from their Git repository. They were last updated ten months ago, which is a bit worrying, and the maintainer hasn’t been very active on Gitlab this year, so I’m not sure how well-maintained of a resource it is. Then again, it went a year and two months without an update and then received a bunch of updates ten months ago so maybe that’s just the speed at which it needs to be updated. Some way of automatically re-checking the various data points to ensure it’s accurate would be neat, not sure if that exists yet.
Anyway, in conclusion, I wouldn’t be opposed to adding Disroot’s SearXNG instance to the Kicksecure start page, and think that adding the searchengine.party page might be a good idea too. I don’t think adding Startpage is a good idea at the moment.
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related:
- Kicksecure Project Transparency wiki page chapter Search Engines.
- Utilize Search Engines, Documentation and AI chapter Search Engines
Quote Local browser homepage for Tor Browser in Whonix - #101 by Patrick - Development - Whonix Forum
My arbitrary criteria:
It’s alternative search engines which provide less censored / more interesting search results. Whonix doesn’t receive payment for any listings. Considered candidates are those having good quality, less censored search results.Privacy by policy / ownership / location / hosted by which data center is not considered. There is no escape from cloudshare / AWS:
[…]
Non-javascript support isn’t considered either. Impractical. Even these forums here require javascript.
High risk of law of triviality / bikeshed. There’s no way to optimize for all goals at once. I don’t intent to spend a lot time debating favorite colors (choice of search engines).
Main question is, do they provide great search results?
Wow this is very interesting! I used Startpage because of the Tor browser - Tor browser has 2 default search engines: Duckduckgo and Startpage. I thought Tor team chose it for enhanced privacy and security. Startpage has been added to list of default search engines in the secure browsers Mullvad and Librewolf. And also, the guys from
Privacy Guides Ad-Free Privacy Tool/Service Recommendations - Privacy Guides also recommend Startpage as a safe search engine after their analysis. And the author of searchengine.party put Startpage above Brave, Duckduckgo, and Qwant. It seems, Snowden gave an interview to Startpage and recommended their search engine in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_RnBX3l124 I liked Startpage for search results and anonymous viewing. At same time your list includes proprietary Perplexity, although this is a very convenient service. for example, it seems to me that Startpage looks more secure than a proprietary service.
As for SearXNG - choice of service is up to you. I just checked that Librewolf uses searx.be server. It seems that in this search engine you can configure search results output from Startpage and then SearXNG can be an alternative if you don’t like Startpage
What do you think about search engine 4get.ca? I have not used it, but on searchengine.party it have good ratings. 4get.ca is very interestingly described here lolcat/4get: 4get is a proxy search engine that doesn't suck - 4get - lolcat's git serber. After reading this, I already to think that SearxNG and 4get.ca are future of protected search engines.
If we are discussing this criterion, what do you think about Mojeek? Why Mojeek?
Mojeek’s web search results are 100% independent. They come from our crawler (MojeekBot) and index of the web, and are ordered using our own ranking algorithms.
To rephrase… This is more of a practical consideration. Do you find yourself using that search engine because you find results that you don’t find on other search engines?
Hello. Your conclusion about the Startpage is interesting. Essentially, the Startpage is Google with a proxy, but also with a large amount of annoying ads. I think the value of this lies only in the proxy, as services like Searx or 4get.ca can replace it without displaying ads. However, I just conducted a test in Searx (Startpage only) and Startpage with the same query and settings, but the results were slightly different.
P.S. I was also surprised by the presence of Perplexity, and I thought they had fully open-sourced the code. Perhaps the presence of a non-open-source service will confuse those who will install Librewolf, Mullvad or Brave browsers in the future through the “Choose Browser” feature. But this raises the question - will Kicksecure-welcome-page be added to all browsers in the “Choose Browser” list?
They are so called “antifa”. I don’t see how you could trust anything they would do.
On the Project Transparency wiki page, Search Engines Criteria have been formalized just now.
disroot SearXNG
Due to the street fight vibe on it’s homepage, it won’t be added due the the now formalized criteria:
- Needs to be relatively POLITICALLY AGNOSTIC: Some search engines may show a strong political bias. This project aims to stay politically neutral to be inclusive and avoid pushing any agenda. The focus is on security and privacy. That’s why strongly biased politically search engines are avoided.
This link won’t be added to kicksecure-welcome-page because it’s only an overview page. It might be suitable somewhere in the wiki but no big focus needed at the kicksecure-welcome-page level.
Same as above.
Privacy wrappers will not be considered.
- Not considered: Privacy by policy / ownership / location / hosted by which data center: These factors are not considered. Even trusted projects like Debian and the Tor Project use services like AWS, Fastly, and CDNs. [1] Most privacy claims by search engines are just “privacy by policy”, and key infrastructure remains hidden. That’s why trust is still needed. For comparison, Kicksecure focuses on security by design and Whonix on anonymity by design. Anything based only on policy is out of scope.
- Not considered: Privacy wrappers: If a search engine only acts as a privacy wrapper, it’s not considered.
However, Startpage might be considered because:
- Less captcha wrappers: Some search engines bombard users with captchas or block them completely if their network is flagged (for example, Tor users, VPN users, or even some normal internet connections). Some privacy-focused search engine wrappers trigger fewer captchas. So this is seen as a useful feature.
This will be included in the next version.
This one might be suitable.
Privacy by policy (which extends to arguments on potential search engine server security) are not considered as per now formalized criteria.
I also find the style of not linking poor. It took me a while to find this. Found it here:
This is not considered due the the now formalized criteria:
- Not considered: Open Source: Very few search engines are Open Source. And even if they are, without access to their databases, the Open Source code is of limited use. For example, even if Google Search were Open Source, very few could actually run it. See also: Artificial intelligence and Policy On Non-Freedom Software
- Not considered: open database: Very few search engines, if any, offer an open database.
- Not considered: decentralization: Very few search engines, if any, are decentralized.
Ideally, yes, but implementation difficulity might prevent this for some browsers (for some time).
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Patrick, I found several popular free open-source alternatives of Perplexity. These search engines work with TOR and have thousands of stars on github. You can consider this for adding to kicksecure and whonix welcome-page to increase the diversity of search results.
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Yes, you are right. Startpage is a google clone that works well with Tor and VPN and does not attack users with captchas. They will ask you to change your Tor/VPN circuit if your IP is on many blacklists. But they will never block or slow down your search with a captcha.
Yes, thank you, it is better expressed like that.
These search engines are very interesting. Scira is probably even more advanced than Perplexity. There’s also https://www.memfree.me/ - it’s also open-source, also popular on GitHub, and also works with Tor.
Yes, /e/ is team of developers is politically neutral
Thanks!
This becomes rather difficult for me to follow. Discussing multiple search engines in 1 forum thread quickly gets confusing.
It might be the case that Search Engines Criteria are disregarded and search engines are only suggested to be promoted due to some other nice goal (such as being Open Source) while having no personal experiences with the search engine and while not personally using the search engine.
I cannot review 10s of search engines. There is limited space on the local browser welcome page. Therefore it needs to be based on criteria and popularity.
Therefore, please submit search engine related feature requests as per the following documentation / forum feature request template:
Local Browser Homepage - Search Engine Feature Request
No further action will be taken based on comments in this forum thread.
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A dedicated wiki page has been created:
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