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Comment by montroser | Hacker News Reader

For a fully independent alternative, see https://private.sh which is uses https://gigablast.com as a data source.

Gigablast itself is an open source crawler, index, and query engine. It is a bit of a quirky one-man project, but also kind of good.

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Since I found out that private.sh was owned by PrivateInternetAccess, I've been hesitant to use it given their recent acquisition by Kape Technologies.

The code for Private.sh is open source so you can actually see what it’s doing instead of trusting it.

Don’t trust, verify :)

You can never be sure that the code you see is the same as the code that powers that website. If you trust the code the best you can do is run your own server.

If you click View Source you can see that queries are absolutely encrypted. Running your own server just changes your IP but it’s still “yours.”

Finally, you shouldn’t “trust” code and run it. You absolutely need to read and understand first and finally, determine if running yourself actually brings benefit.

You can't trust code you don't understand, if you do that don't call it trust, call it faith. Your query has to get decrypted somewhere or else the server wouldn't be able to proxy the request to Google unless it is E2E encrypted but then it is no different than just using a VPN or a socks5 proxy. If that's the case better just use Tor or a VPN and have privacy everywhere instead of just on your search page.

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