The same thing came up realted to GNOME Web: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/librem5-base/merge_requests/36 - phone and laptops should ship the same list (only exception I could see is a engine with super nice search results that doesn't work on mobile)

The Librem 5 team needs a GNOME Web that ships with a list of serach engines that work on mobile and has reasonable results. We need this in GNOME Web ASAP because we'll be shipping the phone in the next couple of months, so for us this is a high priority.

@jonas.smedegaard since you have much more knowledge in this space, if we had to pick one engine today that was best aligned with 1) our freedom philosophy, 2) ability to work on mobile (not sure what's different to make this work), 3) decent search results, 4) work with languages besides English..... what would your recommendation be? We of course don't have to pick one engine today, but it helps get an idea of what we might implement if there is no golden solution by the time we need to provide something before shipment.

DuckDuckGo.

It is not perfect but its features and its limitations are well known both to us and to our users.

I'm just a buyer but my specialty is in surveillance and privacy, currently finishing my master's in communication. I would recommend startpage as an alternative to DuckDuckGo.

https://www.startpage.com/

It is highly customizable, you can make it use EU servers and it also has an option to browse search results through a proxy server, uses POST VS GET for additional privacy and your settings can be saved without a cookie.

Just as a data point: I am a daily startpage user but it has availability and performance problems. I switch to ddg every now and then when startpage does not respond but that is not something we want to put on our users (that's why I opted to merge the ddg patch for the moment).

Just stumbled upon yet another meta search engine which might (or might not - e.g. it doesn't seem decentralized) be relevant to consider: https://search.lilo.org/