Maybe something like marginalia? They have features like sorting results by amount of JavaScript that you might like but I'm not sure of comparable options.
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2025
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The Smol Web
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Community for the appreciation and sharing of links, resources, and culture of: the smol web / small web / ~(w)~ / the indie web / or even the non-www internet (gemini, gopher, etc).
Back of a napkin definition, subject to change: if it's internet accessible and is maintained by a person, especially for non-commercial aims, then I would consider it smol. There are, however, much stricter definitions.
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- https://smolweb.org/
- https://indieweb.org/
- https://smallweb.page/
- https://wikipedia.org/wiki/IndieWeb
- https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/small-internet.html
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Marginalina is a super cool, foss indieweb search engine!! ☺️ I believe there may be another option in that space, maybe somone else can chime in :)
https://marginalia-search.com/
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For more general searching honestly none of the options are without fairly major faults. Either run by people who are varying levels of crappy, or don't work as well as you might want, or aren't independent and so are dependent on a proprietary company continuing toallow them to exist, or all of the above.
I've been using Brave search as my google replacement and the folks behind Brave are pretty crap. But it works reasonably well, is independent with their own index and search algorithm, and keeps me from always using Google. In the current landscape you kinda just pick the thing that in your eyes, sucks the least.
It also has a feature for limiting your search to certain types of sites like the small web, or news, or academic papers, etc, called goggles, but I haven't used it much so I can't speak to how well it works or if other engines may have similar features
I hope you find a setup that works well for you! ❤️
Curious on practices you didn’t agree with. I use Orion browser a lot on my Mac.
As one of the many services they use to provide the best results they can, they use Yandex and just pay them some amount. Yandex is a Russian product.
That's really all there is to it.
Fyi Cory Doctorow used kagi because it worked well.
He says that they basically use Google under the hood without Google fucking with the results you get it tracking you.
Not sure if he still uses it or not