Tag: search

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.

Brave launched a new search feature today that introduces reranking options. The core idea is to give users of the search engine an option to see more results of websites they like or prefer, and less or nothing at all of sites that they do not like or want to see.

This is especially useful if you come upon sites that you do not value highly regularly, or miss articles or information from a site that you do value.

Brave notes that rerank only applies to the current user. It has no impact on a site’s presence on the search engine, other than for the user who made the change. The feature does not require an account, which is another plus.

Denoted sites do not appear in search results any longer on Brave Search. This works similarly to the extension uBlacklist, which works on Google Search only though.

Raised sites get a new ranking signal that boost their ranking. While they may still not be shown in the first few spots in the results, their rank should be higher than before.

Brave Search’s AI component takes the new signals into account, which means that you should see sites mentioned more often or less there as well.

Good to know: the feature uses Brave Goggles, a feature that Brave introduced in 2022. It allows users to create custom filters that change search result rankings.

How to use the new feature on Brave Search

You can access the new feature after you run a search. Click on the new rerank icon in the top right corner to display the options. There you may:

• Raise any listed site to strengthen it in Brave Search.
• Discard any site to make sure it won’t show up in the search results anymore.

The listing changes when you switch pages in the results.

There is no option currently to add custom sites. If you want to get rid of a site or promote one, you need to run a search that includes it. The best way to do that is to search for the name of the site, as it will likely appear in the results in that case.

The finetuning applies to any search. If you raise a site, it will rank higher regardless of search term. That’s important to note, as it may catapult sites that cover anything to the top of the results regularly, if you raise them.

A click on the edit button displays options to remove sites again.

Closing Words

Rerank is an excellent feature that may improve Brave Search for users who use it. While I wish it would include an option to add a site manually, it is possible that it will come at a later point.

It is still possible to run default searches using a browser’s private browsing mode.

You can read more about the new feature on the Brave website.

MetaGer is a privacy-focused search engine that is run by a German non-profit organization. One of its appeals, apart from its focus on privacy, was that you could run searches across multiple search engines.

It also included an interesting feature to search within search results, and to maintain a personal blacklist.

Up until now, you could use an advertisement-powered version or a paid version of the search engine. This changed this week when the maintainers of MetaGer announced that they cannot offer the free version anymore.

The organization claims that Yahoo has terminated contracts that allowed them to run a free version of the search engine with ads.

The version contributed the most to the revenue of the organization. Most expenses were paid from that revenue. With that revenue dropping to zero, MetaGer says that it cannot afford to offer the free version of the search engine anymore.

While that is not the end of MetaGer, as the paid version remains available, it will push the search engine even more into a niche.

About the paid version: The paid version works with tokens. A search requires one token and one hundred token cost $1. In other words, you pay $1 for every 100 searches on the MetaGer platform.

Plans were underway to reduce the dependency on Yahoo

The maintainers admit that they were aware of the Yahoo dependency. Yahoo could make the business collapse like a house of cards if it would terminate the contract.

First steps to reduce the dependency on Yahoo were undertaken. The introduction of a paid ad-free option added a new revenue source.

Next, the organization had plans to introduce its own advertising platform on the site. This would have allowed MetaGer to broker deals with partners directly and earn direct advertising revenue. It would have cut the middlemen out of the equation as well.

Paid memberships increased, but it would have taken several years before full independence according to the organization.

The future of MetaGer

MetaGer continues to be available, albeit only as a paid search engine. Users who want to use the search engine need to buy tokens to do so.

Development and maintenance is reduced, and operation will be reduced to a “very small scale” to make sure the search engine can survive.

Users of MetaGer can help the project through donations or by becoming paid members. Payment options include sending cash per letter or through one of the many available online payment options.

Closing Words

Whether MetaGer can manage with donations and the paid version alone remains to be seen. It is unclear if an agreement with another search engine, Microsoft’s Bing comes to mind, could change the situation for the organization.

Have you heard of MetaGer or even used the search engine? What is your take on the development? Feel free to leave a comment down below.