A report released by The Financial Times reveals that Russia company Yandex is obtaining user data and storing it on Russian servers.
search engine
DuckDuckGo to Release Private Browser for Mac in 2022
On Tuesday, DuckDuckGo shared its review of achievements and improvements in 2021. Looking ahead, the company plans to release a private browser for the desktop.
Instead of forking Chromium or anything else, we’re building our desktop app around the OS-provided rendering engines (like on mobile), allowing us to strip away a lot of the unnecessary cruft and clutter that’s accumulated over the years in major browsers. With our clean and simple interface combined with the beloved Fire Button from our mobile app, DuckDuckGo for desktop will be ready to become your new everyday browsing app.
Private Search Engine 'Xayn' Releases Web Version of its App
An AI company based in Berlin, Germany called Xayn has launched a web version of its private search engine app.
Both versions of Xayn use Masked Federated Learning to protect users’ data privacy while still providing them with an individually tailored web experience. They are created with the same code base in Flutter, a developing framework that’s designed to function both on mobile and web. The team transferred the AI to work directly in the respective browsers with high speed via WebAssembly so that all personal data stays privately within the browsers.
Looks like it doesn’t work yet on Safari.
How Google Search Works: An Insider Reveals All
Google has launched a web page that aims to help people understand how Google Search works and how the team improves and designs this service.
Ad-Free, Private Search Engine 'Neeva' Launches for $4.95 per Month
Neeva is the new search engine on the block. It launches today and promises private, ad-free search with a subscription of US$4.95 per month.
Security Friday! Search Engines and Support - TMO Daily Observations 2021-03-04
Andrew Orr joins host Kelly Guimont for Security Friday news, including updates on cookies and iOS released and some tech support help from Apple.
Brave Prepares to Launch the Brave Search Engine
Private browser Brave is getting ready to launch its own branded search engine with its acquisition of Cliqz.
The former Cliqz dev team, who had subsequently been working on Tailcat, are moving to Brave as part of the acquisition. The engineering team is led by Dr Josep M Pujol — who is quoted in Brave’s PR saying it’s “excited to be working on the only real private search/browser alternative to Big Tech”.
Interesting move, and I look forward to more private search engines.
Apple's Search Engine Situation – TMO Daily Observations 2020-10-29
Bryan Chaffin and Andrew Orr join host Kelly Guimont to discuss Apple’s possible search aspirations and what that means for your data.
Hints of an Apple Search Engine Resurface
A report in the Financial Times (which is paywalled so I’m linking to TechCrunch) claims that Apple could be creating an Apple search engine. Or, maybe the company is instead improving search for Siri or Spotlight.
Apple is now showing its own search results and linking directly to websites when users type queries from its home screen in iOS 14. For context, this is a behavior that has been known for a while as people have seen the feature pop up in beta versions of iOS. And the search volume being up on Apple’s crawler is something that Jon Henshaw of Coywolf had noted back in August.
I’m going with the “improving Siri and Spotlight” take. Apple isn’t known for creating products outside its ecosystem (Music on Android and Apple TV on other devices notwithstanding).
Will we see an Apple Search Engine in the Future?
Jon Henshaw of Coywolf speculates that we may see an Apple search engine in the future based on several factors.
Apple is investing heavily in search, as shown in their job postings for search engineers. The job listings reveal they incorporate AI, ML, NLP, and more into all of their services and apps.
In July 2020, Apple published a significant update to its About Applebot support page. The additions are very similar to the details Google provides to webmasters and SEOs.
It’s an interesting idea, for sure. It could be an Apple search engine, or Apple adding improvements to Siri.
Apple Doesn’t Truly Let You Change Search Engines
Apple lets you go into iOS settings and change your default search engine. But Google is still the default engine when you search via Spotlight.
Startpage News Tab Gives You ‘Unprofiled’ News
Startpage News Tab is a new feature of the search engine that promises to give people news that hasn’t been personalized.
Personally curated feeds, sometimes referred to as a “filter bubble,” are based on an individual’s online behavior constructed by previous search queries, browsing history, social media clicks, IP address, device, and so on…Our goal with Startpage News Tab is to help people break out of that bubble.
Apple Rolls Out Smarter Web Answers for Spotlight Search
Some Apple users are seeing smarter web answers when they use iOS Spotlight Search and Siri.
The new web answers appear to be a further expansion of this technology. If the statistics are not readily available from the knowledge database, it seems Apple is now using algorithms to crawl websites and find possible responses to questions.
I think this is great, and it might be the first front-facing results we’re seeing from Apple’s hiring of John Giannandrea.
Startpage Voted Best Search Engine in Germany, Beating Google
Privacy search engine Startpage has been voted the Best Search Engine in Germany by Stiftung Warentest, beating Google.
macOS: A Shortcut to Pick Your Safari Search Engine
This gives you an option to change the search engine, but also gives you a list of recent searches.
macOS: Use Spotlight to Directly Search Google with this Shortcut
Andrew Orr has another cool tip from Reddit. Using a simple keyboard shortcut, you can use your Mac’s Spotlight to directly search using your default search engine. It saves you from manually going to Safari and searching from the address bar.