The developer of the Waterfox web browser announce Waterfox Private Search earlier this week. The new search engine is in open beta currently, which means that you can give it a try if you want to.
Waterfox Private Search pulls data from other search engines privately, unlike Brave Search, which uses its own engine for search results.
Here are the details:
- Waterfox Private Search is a meta-search engine. Means, it will support several search engines and not just one. During the beta, results come only from Google Search though.
- A proxy is used for communication with the supported search engines. Means, the search engines won’t see your IP address or other information.
- The search engine won’t feature any AI content, e.g., AI summaries.
- There will be two tiers in the long run.
- An ad-supported tier, that shows “privacy-friendly advertisement” that won’t track users or create user profiles. These will be contextual ads based on the search.
- A subscription-based tier that removes all advertisement.
You can point your browser to Waterfox Search to give it a go.
The search engine works as expected. You type in a query and get results. These come from Google, but it is refreshing to see that the main focus is on the search results and not added content. While you do get some, such as a “People Also Ask” module, the main focus is clearly on returning web links to the user.
A click on the options menu displays just a few. You can change the location there to get results from a different region and use the domain blocklist to exclude certain websites from the results.
You may also switch search engines, with Bing, Brave, and Mojeek listed, but not yet selectable.
A click on the themes icon in the main interface displays a good dozen or so themes that you can switch between. There should be something for everyone, from very light to dark, colorful and even cyberpunk.
As far as search options are concerned, there are just a few available as menus. A click on the settings icon shows an option to disable autocorrect and to set a specific time period for the search.
You may also switch from web search results to images, videos or news. Other options, including shopping or books are not available.
The loading of search results takes a bit longer, but not too long to be unpleasant. It remains to be seen if the loading time will change when traffic increases.
Initial verdict: Based on a preliminary test, Waterfox Private Search is a refreshingly focused search engine. I did not spot any ads during my tests, but these will come in the future. Privacy-friendly ads are not anything new, but they are more than welcome and if they are implemented in an unobtrusive way, likely not a problem for the majority of Private Search users.
There is certainly the question of sustainability. Ads play a key role here and so does the subscription-based tier. This only works if enough users sign up or see ads when they use the search engine.
Now You: which search engine is your favorite currently and why? Feel free to leave a comment down below to join the discussion.
Waterfox Private Search when displaying results,
– Connects to [encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com], and not on its behalf [proxy) so Google servers know my IP is calling Waterfox … call me a purist, but private means private.
– Displays ‘People also ask’ which is a pain in the neck. I’m not searching on people’s behalf.
– Displays an ‘Images’ block (and maybe ‘Videos’ and ‘News’ blocks as well) in Web results when these are available in the navigation bar, right above : idiocy, authentic idiocy.
– Connects to sites from which it retrieves images and videos, again on the user’s behalf. All search engines I use (a dozen) don’t do that.
My conclusion, at this time : ‘Waterfox Private Search’ should be renamed to ‘Waterfox Search’
As for the Search engines I personally use :
Default : SearXNG (metasearch), one of its instances given many exist.
Brave Search, DuckDuckGo, eTools Metasearch, Mojeek (uses its own index), Qwant (tries to survive when doing everything to sink, but give it a chance), Marginalia, Mullvad Leta Metasearch (proxies Google and Bing search results only), Startpage, Stract, Wiby, Yep (never use it, has an AI Chat which is a genuine joke, why do I keep it among my bookmarks? Because I’ve built some Browser things turning on the basis of 12 search engines : this time the idiot is me).
That’s it, folks. Enjoy May the First.
Thanks for your list, Tom!
Haven’t heard of Mulvad’s Leta or Marginalia before. Will add them to my list. Leta seems to cache search results, so you might not receive the latest search results. Might be seen as a positive since a cached search would not ping Google or Brave directly.
Marginalia appears to use its own search algorithm. I haven’t played enough with this one to give an opinion yet.
I noticed a lot of empty space between one result and another and the non-possibility of having the censorship filter (activated or deactivated), it always seems to me active.
Search engines aside, I opened Waterfox this morning with genuine surprise. It had an update, but the responsiveness compared to Firefox. It may be time for the switch. I’ve been so disgruntled with FF the last few months; Waterfox has always been installed; it has all my extensions, bookmarks, and then some. Compact Mode. I can see more screen with Waterfox than FF could ever hope to provide, but I’m sure why I am suddenly finding Waterfox preferable. Hmmm . . .
Privacy is not the issue these days. SEO on Google has made searching pratically useless.
It’s near impossible for me to find what I’m searching for, I just get irrelevant results they wan’t to shove in my face.
I was trying to find an image of a School that lets children do mildly dangerous things and all I got was shool shootings.
I did eventually find what I was looking for after I finally figured out the exact term I had to use to return the result I wanted. It’s a TED talk named “The best kindergarten ever”.
As I understand it from the developer, the default search engine on the Waterfox browser is Bing. So it seems a bit odd that the new independent search engine draws its searches from Google. Maybe Kontos fell out with Microsoft and got a better deal from Google.
In any event, paying to use a search engine doesn’t appeal to me at all. There are plenty of free alternatives as mentioned in Tom Hawack’s post and unless the paid-for Waterfox search tool can demonstrate that it’s superior to all the others I don’t see the point of it.