Should I be worried about this development?
So far, I’ve tried Stract and 4get, and I’m not impressed with how limited they are - they’re not accurate, and no image and video search is what turns me away from them.
Metasearch engines like SearXNG aren’t that impressive, their results have too many filler results. My experience with manually tweaking their search also did not go well. Any alternatives with good defaults?
It will not share data about you until you specifically use the chat function. It’s on a different tab, like the image tab and the video tab.
And when you use it, it works as a privacy proxy, like piped and invidious does with youtube, or libreddit with reddit
I would not call that a “privacy proxy”, it is very disingenuous. It is a normal proxy, which replaces the technical metadata from your connection, so that automated tracking is harder. But it will not replace or remove any of your input. And you can easily be tracked that way too.