A group of ex google employees have pooled their skills and resources together and created what they claim is an ad free search engine…
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Checkout their website
Regain your privacy! Adopt /e/ the unGoogled mobile OS and online services
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It looks interesting.
The big question is whether there are enough potential customers who are prepared to pay for a service which, currently, they get for no monetary cost but at the expense of a: giving up their data and privacy, and b: seeing advertisements in their search results.
It would be great if that happens, and I wish them luck, but I am not convinced that it will happen: for the vast majority of potential users, I think that “free” beats “privacy” or " no ads". I’d like to be wrong, but I won’t be betting good money on it.
I also checked out their jobs page, and they don’t seem to be going down the remote working route that many software companies (and others) are increasingly moving to. If you want to work for them, you’ll need to be earning enough to move to Mountain View, Ca. So I won’t be working for them either 
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The thing with software companies is, that they only need a small percentage of paying customers. Just imagine, Amerika, Europe and India is their market. Thats what, >1.5 Billion people. Now take, roughly half, for digitized populas: 750Mio. Now lets say they gain 1Promille Marketshare. Thats 750k users. Let them pay 1$ per month. Boom. 9Mio per year.
Is it Open Source? I can’t see an indication on the website.
Seems like no.
Also the Privacy Policy doesnt read too good in my opinion, but at least they dont share data with Ad companys
I am a tester for them and I like the idea of paying for private search.
I’m not sure the privacy is any better than duckduckgo, though being completely ad free has appeal.
They are creating a search engine for more than the web, intending to include other services like your email and cloud in the results. I have not experienced that because the alpha only supports gmail, which I refuse t use for privacy reasons. Kind of an odd choice for company built around avoiding Google surveillance. I suppose for testing they just went for the granddaddy of email market share.
They are building features to make search in general more efficient, including some human curation. Interesting ideas. Worth paying attention to, but I’m not sold yet.
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I am sorry but this whole thing just stinks. There is no transparency, no indication of open source and a distinct air of jumping on the bandwagon and trying to work off the back of all the hard work done by EFF.org, duckduckgo etc. Why don’t these people just try and get jobs with the aforementioned and try to work with the correct ethos of genuine privacy?
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Seems sketchy as f**k. Their privacy policy sucks, they collect information about sites you visit, and other big no-nos!
I won’t use it, ever.
As this is made by former Google employees, I also don’t expect much good coming from this.
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