 All right, what's up? I want to tell you the search engine that I definitely recommend. I've been using it for a long time It definitely I mean it's much better than using Google But it even has the edge over stuff like duck duck go I know a lot of people use duck duck go, but here is the main problem when using search engines Let's go ahead and get this out. Okay You never really know What duck duck go is running on their server? We just have to trust them about a lot of the stuff they say about privacy And in fact, that's sort of the case no matter what When we're dealing with a search engine you sort of just have to trust them now the best case scenario though Is this search engine called sirks and not only is it basically the best for your privacy or you know one of the best At least there might be something that does something similar, but sirks is also it has fantastic features It does lots of crazy stuff that really gives it the edge. So first off. Here's the thing about sirks Okay, sirks is a free software actually I pulled up a sirks search of sirks. That's a good tongue twister so this is what it looks like when you search for something and You know, I have dark theme on or whatever, but here's the interesting thing sirks is not one particular site It is free software that you could run on your own server or you know, usually, you know I don't run it on my own server yet. I'm thinking about it There is like a huge list of different instances of sirks if you go to sirks dot space It will list out a bunch of instances and information about them like where they are You know, you're up the approximate search time from where you are And other stuff like that. Okay, so I happen to be using this first one right here But you know, it actually changes which ones that are at the top usually at the top means the best if you go down Lower it'll show like slower instances or stuff like that So anyway, sirks, let's let's talk about what it does now. Here's the other thing about sirks It's not just this it's not really a search engine It is a was it says a privacy respecting meta search engine because what it does is, you know See that I've typed in here sirks or on this tab I searched for Linux what it actually does is it takes that search term and it pulls a bunch of different Search engines and gives you the results. Okay, if you're familiar with start page start page does this just with Google It's really just a front-end for accessing Google if you don't want to directly use Google So you don't want them spying on you sirks does that but for way like all these other search engines as well Okay, so if you look at these results, let's actually look at them You know each one of them will say, okay, this one's from wiki data. It's from Bing and it's from duck duck go This runs from duck duck go being in Wikipedia and again, you're not directly accessing duck duck go or being or any of that stuff It is accessing those sites for you. Okay, so it basically gets aggregates all those and displays them for you And of course it also has this stuff on the side You know, I think by default it has like a Wikipedia tab thing I assume that's Wikipedia, but it'll have other stuff as well Notice also there are different categories. Okay. Oh, and this down here is your search link if you need to use that Because you as you can see it. Well, anyway So if you look at these other tabs, it has other, you know, you can do images for example Or let's go to let's spice it up and go to Linux or it looks like I already clicked on it and clicked back But you can click on different categories. Let's say we want images It'll show me Linux images. Of course, it'll be very slow not because of Sirks, but because I'm in a cabin in the middle of the woods So and again, it will aggregate each of these from different image sites. Okay, they have a tab that's called IT That does like Stack Overflow or ArchWiki or different sites like that to GitHub Music news. I don't think it works on the instance. I'm on here, but there's also a files tab Yeah, it doesn't work on my instance That's sometimes blocked on a bunch of different instances because what files is it is it basically pulls a different Pulse a bunch of different torrent sites So you could search if you have this on an instance that actually works You could actually just search a movie title and it'll give you torrents for it so let's talk about how to Customize it and stuff like that because the speakers the features in it are very special. Okay Now I'm gonna go to preferences. I have a couple things said already You know like dark theme and stuff like that. You know, there's the style You can also actually this reminds me so for if you're let's say you're looking for academic articles You can automatically have it go through Psyhub to get rid of paywalls and stuff like that That's something that it can do automatically. I think you actually have to enable that in plugins Which I don't have enabled. Okay So, yeah, it has some plugins that will automatically do HTTPS if available stuff like that gets rid of you are You know URL trackers and those stupid things that some sites do So it's very handy for all that but let's look at the engines in particular. Okay, so on the engines page You can actually and again, these are the same tabs We saw before like images general stuff like that you can actually decide what sites you're looking at When you're doing a search and again remember your your computer is not contacting any of these sites It's sirks that is contacting them. So let's say I want oh, I want the etymology of a word I look up I'll turn on etym online Let's say I'm looking for free books. I'll go to library Genesis Well, I'm not gonna turn that on here because if you look on this right column It'll actually show you the average time it takes to pull that site And this is really handy because you know, let's say archive Well, this is an archive.org but it's archive s is So, you know, there are some sites that might be really slow like archive.org So you might want to put a maximum time on them or something like that Or sirks will usually put maximum times by default, but a lot of this you can change Okay, so if you want to search for let's say just an image by itself Now I showed you you can you know go here and click on images But if you want to just search all your image sites you can just say images And then we'll look for, you know, Richard Stallman. Actually, it looks like I typed that in before just to make sure, you know So if I look for Richard Stallman Should have actually loaded it so it wouldn't take forever on my Internet here, but here so here we have a bunch of pictures Now as well you could search And this is sort of like bank tags on duck duck go In that, you know, you can type like, I don't know dollar sign or not dollar sign exclamation point Um, I don't even know WT to go to Wixionary. That's one of the only ones I know on duck duck go But you can do the same stuff here. Um, let's say you, uh, you know, let's say we're on images or something like that Let's say I specifically want to search Bing images. So the Bing shortcut Bing images is bi So I'm here and I'm just like, uh, give me a wallpaper Okay, uh, and it's so sirks is just going to pull Bing and get the Bing results And give you just those. Uh, so that's pretty convenient. And of course, that's not just for images That's for any of these general searches, you know, let's say we we want the etymology of what etymology do we want? Um, uh, I don't know feather. Okay, that should search etym online And uh, bring up. Yeah, it'll bring up the results from that site. So oh, look, let's look at the etymology of the word feather Or something like that. Um, so it's a very nice equivalent to duck duck go bang tags Now I will say if you're if you feel like, oh, I wish I had more of these, um, You know, like there's some sites that are on duck duck go as bang tags, but they're not on sirks Um, usually what I do and this actually I use in general is in your browser, whatever it is. I'm you know, I'm on brave Uh, but you can usually set up custom search engines with like keywords. So that's actually what I have here So I have a bunch of different, you know, if I type in bib, it'll go to bib leo And that's you know, that's a book buying site or liab goes the library genesis if you want free PDFs of books Other stuff like that, you know arch wiki Things like that. Um, so if you don't see, you know, I know a lot of people are invested in like duck duck goes bang tags Yeah, sirks sort of has an equivalent, but you know Worst comes the worst you can always use your built-in browser features to do that Um, okay, so let's see what else. So in general, yeah, sirks has been very nice Um, it's nice to be able to Um, you know use different sirks instances I will say every once in a while one of them will collapse or something I mean, it might be that once I do this video and I said, oh, I was using this one Everyone uses it and maybe that you know, that's too much bandwidth for it But it's nice because you know, you can freely search, you know Switch to any one of these set them as your default engine and it works pretty much fine And um, you know, I I'd sort of like to start my own instance at some point just to have it Um, so I might do that in the future now one additional thing I will say if anyone's I don't know who develops sirks One feature I'd really like is the ability to have a custom block list. Okay That might sound like something a little weird to say Um, and the thing is I will say obviously there's a safe search on sirks and that works pretty well Like if you search for images Um, you know, if you search for something that's maybe borderline, you're not going to get porn if you have Your safe search on but aside from that, like I'd like to just be able to block entire sites like, you know I'm not gonna, you know, because a lot of times, you know, the thing is like google Um, you know, even in sirks when you're using different, uh, search engines Some of those search engines like google like strongly bias their Results in favor of particular sites. Um, but the thing is like I I don't care what cnn is going to say about this topic I don't care what the splc has to say. I wish I could just block some sites, you know, like forced meme sites That's what I mean mean or sites that like I know are never going to be useful or something So that'd be a nice feature to add like user block lists. Um, but aside from that, uh, yeah, I don't know It's it's been I definitely feel like sirks gives me everything that any other search engine has given me A lot more and a lot more customizability and stuff like that. Um, so go to sirks.space Pick an instance just pick one randomly. Maybe someone one that's physically close to you or something like that. Um, And uh, I might actually switch my instance. Uh, but uh, you know, it's just just play around with it. Um, Way to keep yourself safe from google still get better search results and have a bunch of other features on top. Um, yep So that's it. See you guys next time