➡ The text discusses various search tools, highlighting their pros and cons. Cirksing is an open-source tool that searches through multiple engines without tracking, but its future is uncertain. Start Page provides Google-like results without profiling, but it uses ads and has a frustrating captcha. DuckDuckGo is privacy-respecting but has limited results and a bias towards Wikipedia data. Brave Search is safe but has sparse results. Find and GROC are AI-assisted tools that provide robust search solutions, but they have their limitations.

➡ The article suggests replacing Google search with CirXing for better results. It also mentions AI-assisted search tool, Find, and warns against using DuckDuckGo and Brave due to poor search results. The author appreciates community support for their channel and introduces the Brax3 Privacy Fund, a tool to prevent location tracking. They also promote other privacy-focused services like Brax Virtual Phone, Braxmail, and BytesVPN, available on their social media site, Braxme.

It’s gotten a bit complicated now. Back in the day, all we had to think about was Googling something, and that’s all we needed to know about search. Search is big business, obviously now, and is the prime driver of big tech. The leader in search is, of course, Google search and followed next by YouTube. But search is also a big part of the surveillance infrastructure. And if you don’t understand this, then you know that a record of your search has become part of your personal data. This is often out of sight, out of mind, until you notice that law enforcement routinely uses search data of individuals to search for evidence and motives.

And this gets even more complex as SIOP operations to change your point of view started from Google utilizing search and search results as a control tool. Some of you have ventured out and tried alternate search engines like a DuckDuckGo, for example. And I personally don’t use DuckDuckGo anymore. Today, there are many options and new terminologies. There are privacy-focused search engines and metasearch engines and search engines powered by AI. And regardless of the choice, the main criteria should still be that it gives good search results. In this video, I’ll cover some alternatives, and the goal at the end is to convince you to change your browser search engines to something other than Google search.

Stay right there. I just want to make it clear to you from the outset that using Google search is not an option you should consider. Google search is directly tied to your Google ID and everything you do, and everything you do, including every click on the internet, is also monitored through that same Google ID. And shockingly, this includes about everything you do online. The amount of data accumulated is staggering. Combine that with known actions on Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs, Google Photos, social media, and so on, and you’re basically creating shackles to your future freedom.

You will be known completely to someone at Google and ripe for manipulation, as they’ve already tried to do and explained in my PSYOP video. Google search is not just a personal record. It is also a societal gauge as what the population searching for quantifies the effectiveness of mass communications and mass messaging. While some people would think that Google search terms that are popular are organic, it is also an indicator as to what message could be amplified further, again one of the tools of a proper PSYOP. Search data has also been used to suppress information.

We should know this well during the COVID era as you can search for alternative approaches as they were filtered out. So we want to definitely fight back by not having a search engine control us. What is not clear is what are the alternatives to Google search which currently controls 90% of the market. Simply switching to another search provider may result in just a change of name but the tracking and even the actual results may be identical. This is why we need to understand the actual market today. A big picture view of popular search engines.

Aside from Google search, the popular search engines include Bing from Microsoft, Yandex from Russia and Baidu from China. Believe it or not, only these four are left standing. These providers actually perform the web crawling and indexing of data so they take information directly from web content on the internet. In order to be classified as a search engine, the search provider needs to actually crawl the internet for its own data sources. By the way, voice assistants like Siri use the same search engines like Google and Bing depending on a contract. There is no doubt here that Google is the king of the hill when it comes to search.

This is primarily because most websites want to analyze their performance or SEO, search engine optimization, via Google and Google provides the tools called Google Analytics. So basically website owners are actively offering their data to Google while all other sites have to be discovered using web crawling robots. Google has web crawled hundreds of billions of websites far more than any search provider. Added to that is the full Google advertising technology that allows websites to monetize so no wonder sites are big in Google basically to put them in at the top of Google search.

In spite of this competition from Google, sites like Bing have grown certainly with huge investments from Microsoft, but Bing does not have the reach of Google which currently controls 90% of the search market, excluding YouTube. There’s another category of search tools I will mention later and with specific platforms and that’s AI enhanced search. So not search by itself, but AI enhanced by search. This gives the benefit of a more in-depth understanding of your query together with newer data from the internet. This is a big benefit versus directly using products like chat GPT that do not have current event data in their models.

Piggyback search engines. Now this is an interesting detail that many of you will not know. There’s another category of search providers I call piggyback search engines, just my term. What’s unique about these are that they don’t actually do the web crawling of data themselves. Instead, they take their content from other search engines, sometimes repackaging the content or simply taking that data and combining it with other data from other search engines. The main one in this category is Yahoo search, and there are search engines that are partially in this category, tuk tuk go and brave search.

While Yahoo used to be known as the big competitor to Google search back in the day, today Yahoo is actually completely powered by Bing. Similarly, tuk tuk go and brave are partially powered by Bing. And another one with a similar hybrid source is quant. Tuk tuk go, brave and quant are hybrid providers in that they do some of their own web crawling or maybe have an arrangement for an external source like the Bing API, but they also combine results from other search engines. Thus they operate partly as a true search engine and partly as a meta search engine.

Meta search engines. I’ll introduce you to a new term and it is meta search. Meta search is when a search provider actually searches other search engines and do not actually collect the raw data themselves. I’ve already mentioned that tuk tuk go, brave and quant actually take part of their data from other search engines. I will add to these which start page which really takes mostly from Google and some from Bing. And the true meta search example is seer xng. What you will find that is interesting here is that all of the search providers classified as meta search engines are all privacy respecting, though some will be better than others.

I’m going to go to details that is more, but based on this finding on privacy respecting search, you will likely guess that I will recommend more of these in the meta search category. We’ll get back to that. Fracking search engines. In the meantime, let’s make a clear distinction. Google search being Yahoo, Yandex and Baidu, just naming the big ones, are tracking search engines. They leave a tracking cookie on your machine and basically create a surveillance machinery for identifying your device and tracking what you search. While Google has better tools for tracking using the Google ID, other engines use tools like browser fingerprinting and device fingerprinting and cookie tracking to create a history of what you do.

Then plain speak, just remove all of these search engines from all your browsers. However, as we will discover later, it does not mean you skip the search results from these search sites as you will just extract that search data indirectly using meta search methods we will discuss later. One of the things I teach you to stop Google tracking you is to do browser isolation. Basically, I tell you to isolate Google and related platforms like YouTube to a single browser, typically Chrome. Then you access other sites using another browser like Brave, Firefox, Chromium, Safari, depending on your device.

By doing this, the Google ID tracking is severely constrained since Google cannot track across browsers. This is a very important technique. But part of this technique is to use the proper search engines on all your browsers. And even if the browser is Chrome, I will tell you never to use Google search. There is absolutely no reason to give Google more data to collect when there are better options. Let me now discuss the specific privacy respecting platforms available. And I will tell you which ones I recommend or why I do not use some of them any longer.

Cirks thing. Rather than drag it to the last minute, I will reveal to you my top recommendation for a privacy respecting meta search engine. And this is spelled Cir X N G. Cir X is actually supposed to be pronounced Cirks. So I suppose you could call Cir X N G Cirksing or Cirks N G. I’m sure the internet police will not care what you call it or you can just ignore the internet police. But the original project actually was called Cirks. And that project is no longer maintained. Then one of the original project maintainers for Cirks to Cirks N G and this is currently the active project.

However, I caution you as that person that initially for Cirks N G has also left the project. So now there’s a different group of maintainers. This is a project that’s completely open source, which makes it stand out and none of the other solutions I will mention later are open source. Unfortunately, being open source means that the current group running the show may lose interest and this may change form again in the future. Anyway, that’s part of the risk. But in the meantime, we can utilize this tool for free. Cirksing can be installed directly on your computer, though I caution you that it is anything but simple.

I was actually planning on creating a shared server I can share with you folks using the provided open source installation files. But given the lack of certainty about the long term viability of the project, for now I’m pointing you to public servers that are powered by Cirksing. So you don’t have to look for a public server. Just go to the Braxme website and I have a Cirksing button right at the top, click that and you can do your search. And then you can bookmark that so you don’t forget it. I will change the public servers in it as there are many but this is one I tested as more reliable.

One of the advantages of Cirksing is that it will actually search through 246 search engines including small ones and it will have no tracking or profiling and guaranteed by open source. Basically, each search will be set anonymously to the various search engines and then compiled by the Cirksing engine. There are 78 public instances of Cirksing sites that you can use if you don’t like the one I chose to link on Braxme. In general, what I found was actually very good search results, more extensive than I would find on a go and certainly brave.

This is important. If the search engine has a lot of holes and doesn’t give a lot of search results, then there is no point using this instead of Google. And Cirksing also uses Google. However, Google is known to block heavy searches from sites it will determine as robots. So depending on the Cirksing instance, some will be forced to use non-Google sources. Unfortunately, this is the problem with using something that is free and with no possible monetization. Thus, this may impact search results. The best way to overcome this is to install Cirksing on your local machine like a Docker instance on your Linux machine.

But honestly, I can’t say this is simple to do. In any case, if you can use this for everyday searching, you will be invisible to any search tracking, but get better results. I will mention AI assisted search later on, but what you will discover is that many of the models that use search engine data to add AI contacts actually use Cirksing as the source. Start page. I’ve known about start page for a long time and I know the people from start page. And while there’s a bit of disinformation on their value, it is actually a very important tool.

What makes start page an excellent choice is that it is primarily based on Google search. So your results will be as detailed as Google’s results, but without the profiling of the results based on your identity. In other words, it makes the Google data safer. The start page model, however, is ad based. Start page does make money off ads based on what you search for. However, the ads are targeted from your search query itself and not from any data collected by you. The way it gets Google data is via proxy. So start page is not a regular meta search engine.

It is specifically a Google proxy. To Google you appear as an unknown entity represented by the start page proxy. And then the results are returned to you from the proxy. There’s no identity involved, but the monetization model here is what is going to bring certainty. While Google searches iffy with Cirksing with the possibility of being blocked by IP address by Google, if the volume of searches large, start page does not have any restrictions. And this is because it is my understanding that they pay Google for the search results. I read that they do some searches through Bing as well, though Google’s a primary source.

This means that start page is more reliable and giving good search results compared to others. Obviously Google search results are 100 times better than ones from Bing, which is the main source of the other meta search engines. Again, don’t be put off by the ads. This at least gives us a way to get access to Google search data without selling our soul to Google. However, let me tell you the main bad thing about start page. Since they pay for search results to Google, they don’t want meta search engines utilizing their data for free.

So to protect themselves, there is that very irritating capture that unfortunately you encounter frequently. So this is the biggest negative with them. Still, I use primarily search thing and start page on my browsers. These are my recommended choices, and you will find yourself free of entities tracking what you search for. DuckDuckGo DuckDuckGo became popular initially because it was supposed to be the uncensored search platform. But they burned those bridges with a lot of users because they started doing a lot of censorship in recent years, certainly around the time of the pandemic. I remember some followers complained about something DuckDuckGo did by taking some political side.

But for some reason, this information has now been scrubbed from the internet. Hmm, interesting what a search engine can do, right? So now I don’t recall what the incident was, but I remember getting a lot of flack from it from many years ago, because by default, we installed DuckDuckGo browser on many Google Fonts, which obviously used DuckDuckGo search. However, since no one can remember what the political issues were from DuckDuckGo, why did I stop using it? I’m going to tell you now that DuckDuckGo gets a big chunk of its data from Wikipedia.

We already know how tainted Wikipedia is, and I discussed that in another video. Because of this, the search results suck. They do some web crawling, they do some meta searches from other search engines, but their main source is still Bing and Wikipedia. And unfortunately, when I search using DuckDuckGo, I get such limited results that basically it’s useless for something slightly obscure. It’s almost like some of these search engines are geared towards the top first page list of results only. The good news about DuckDuckGo, which means you can safely use it, is that it is a privacy-respecting search platform, so you are welcome to use it, particularly for shallower search topics, but I wouldn’t necessarily trust the results that are biased towards Wikipedia data.

While I complain about DuckDuckGo, the one with the sparsest search results, it’s definitely Brave Search. For this reason, to me, it is practically unusable. And especially when it includes Leo the AI to screen the data, you end up with such a short blurb that it is not sufficient for researching. Definitely Brave is safe to use, it is privacy safe, and the Brave browser is outstanding, and it’s the primary browser I use for non-Google stuff. But I use circseeing and start page on Brave, not Brave Search. Brave doesn’t want to completely rely on Bing, so it relies mostly on its own web crawling, which unfortunately is a very small piece of the internet data.

For more technical search and with AI assistance, one of the best resources I’ve found is Find, and I use it for free and with a VPN. This is not designed as a privacy-respecting search tool necessarily, that’s why the VPN protection. But what makes this unique and powerful is that it uses open source models from Olama together with search data to give you results. I don’t see what search engine is attached to Find, but most of the AI tools actually use circseeing as their search source, so it is possible that that is what’s used here.

So this is a more robust search solution in that you don’t have to dig out the individual web pages. The AI will effectively summarize it for you, together with the analysis provided by the AI model they use. While this is free, they have the big models available for subscription. I use Find for general search, but actually Find focuses on coding AI. It is actually capable of analyzing, debugging, and writing code, so this is mainly targeting the software developer. But as I said, it actually functions very well for general search. GROC Similar to Find, there’s GROC.

GROC is not just raw AI like a chat GPT. Similar to Find, GROC is tied to a built-in search engine, and thus it accumulates information from posts on X together with other sources, mostly Reddit it looks like. My only main complaint with GROC is that it sources a lot of opinions from Reddit, which in itself is full of this information. However, understanding the limitations of its current sources, it is at least up to date, and it’s a refreshing change from asking AI tools like chat GPT, or even a local open source AI using Olama, and not getting up to date information.

AI by design learns from data it is provided during its machine learning phase, and so you cannot ask it any current event, it will just hallucinate. GROC unfortunately is a paid service, it came free with my verified X account, which is fairly cheap, but obviously not something you’d look for if you don’t already have it. Summary In summary, we’ll keep it simple. Strike Google search off the list, remove it as the search engine for any browser. Instead, I recommend that you use CirXing, which I provide a link for you on the top of Braxme, and Start page.

While it is certainly safe to use DuckDuckGo and Brave, I don’t find that they give good search results. And for AI assisted search, I’m liking Find. Folks, as many of you know, this channel does not have any sponsors. Instead, we rely completely on community support to keep us going. Hopefully we give you enough information that you find value. Thank you for those who support us on Patreon, Locals, and YouTube memberships. For most of our support, we instead strive to provide products and services that help you in your privacy journey. Our newest product is the Brax3 Privacy Fund.

This is a community project involving several companies and is sold on BraxTech.net. This is an important tool in the privacy battle, as it is immune from things like location tracking from Big Tech. We have other products and services that can be found on our privacy social media site, Braxme. We have Brax Virtual Phone that gives you inexpensive, no KYC phone numbers for better anonymity. We have Braxmail, which offers unlimited aliases in many domains to create different email identities. We have BytesVPN, which protects your IP addresses from being harvested by data brokers. Join us on Braxme and meet the way over 100,000 users who discuss privacy issues daily.

And as I said, CirXing is linked at the top of the site now. Thank you for watching, and see you next time. [tr:trw].

See more of Rob Braxman Tech on their Public Channel and the MPN Rob Braxman Tech channel.