Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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How feasible is privacy-respecting personalised search engine results? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 days ago by communism@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

12 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The issue with Google's personalised search results is, imo:

Not only is it not opt-in, but you can't even opt out of it. Personalised search results should be opt-in and disabled by default.
The data kept on you is used to sell you ads
The data kept on you will be handed over to state entities fairly easily

Given those three problems, how feasible would it be to self-host a search engine that personalises your results to show you things that are more relevant to you? Avoiding issues 1 & 2 as you're self-hosting so presumably you have made the decisions around those two things. And issue 3 is improved as you can host it off-shore if you are concerned about your domestic state, and if you are legally compelled to hand over data, you can make the personal choice about whether or not to take the hit of the consequences of refusing, rather than with a big company who will obviously immediately comply and not attempt to fight it even on legal grounds.

A basic use-case example is, say you're a programmer and you look up ruby, you would want to get the first result as the programming language's website rather than the wikipedia page for the gemstone. You could just make the search query ruby programming language on any privacy-respecting search engine, but it's just a bit of QoL improvement to not have to think about the different ways an ambiguous search query like that could be interpreted.

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[–] HappyFrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Are there even open source indexing software available?

[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 6 points 2 days ago

There's YaCy. I've run a node for a while but it ended up filling up my server's drive just indexing german wikipedia and the results were terrible.

And it's still not private because you have to broadcast the query across the network.

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

None that im aware of. There are webscrapers, and I guess you could just webscrape and dump the results into a postgres db and use it to index. But I'm guessing you'll eventually want something more tuned/custom? But even if it existed, there is the discovery problem. How do you find the sites to scrape? Bing and google both let site operators submit urls, but that isn't gonna scale to self-hosting.

[–] HappyFrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 days ago

Yeah, exactly. I just think that making anonymous request from google or bing is private enough for me.

[–] echedeylr@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Stract, Marginalia, Wiby, Mwmbl, etc

The two first are NLnet funded and the second one is one of the best developed despite it uses Java in contrast to Rust. I see the developer taking the development very seriously.