Selfhosted

literally 5 posts down from this one there is someone who's spent 2 years making their own search engine because Google is shit lmao

https://lemmy.world/post/49999317

Duckduckgo is surprisingly okay, even with non-english queries by using the region selector (your experience may vary)

The modern internet is getting filthier by the day. Gone are the days where independent software used to be a thing I suppose.

Degoog! https://github.com/degoog-org/degoog

This might be one of those things where self hosting isn't worth the pain, like email.

I've been using Kagi for several years now and have been very happy with it.

"internet indexer" should really be a government / EU / UN sponsored public utility thing. And then you have front ends that can improve the search query and filter and sort the results.

I don't know how much it would cost / how large a data center it would take to cache the web pages like google does. But there is just no reason to have so much wealth / advertising drain from the public for such a fundamental thing.

https://startpage.com/

searxng also doesn't really seem to work these days..

Of note, this depends on the instance. I occasionally hop between public instances whenever one is no longer reliable. Google and friends are blocking requests from SearXNG instances because it is in their business interests to kill competition

As for alternatives, I would avoid DDG since they seem to be going a similar route as Google with a front page filled with ads and the emphasis towards their chatbot is not to my taste. Plus, DDG is hosted in the U.S., so privacy-wise it's not as good. Startpage was purchased by an American advertising company some time ago, which isn't great. Brave Search is also one, but they are doing some shady things on their browser with crypto and whatnot, so I don't particularly trust them. Plus, they are an American for-profit.

Qwant and Ecosia are solid options, the former is a French for-profit and the latter a German non-profit, and they are working towards an independent European search index that is being trialled in France! Both are quite good, Qwant is shinier and magical blue, while Ecosia is simpler and earthy green.

Ecosia also uses a portion of their revenue for planting trees, which is really neat, and they are super transparent about where their earnings go!

I personally use a mix of SearXNG and Ecosia, and I sometimes use Qwant too for certain queries.

I run SearXNG and haven't looked back honestly, could never get on with Whoogle's UI

Searxng works fine for me. It's at least as good as google?

yet another google "proxy" : https://www.lukol.com/

• Yacy
• SearxNG
• Degoog!

Are about the only selfhosted ones I know of. I run SearxNG and have a good deal of success with it. It does bork image searches sometimes and tosses in these lithograph artworks, which are quite interesting to me, but don't help in the search itself. In as much as it will draw the ire of some, AI makes a pretty good search engine if you are searching for really specific things like: List all Blues artists that were active in 1942 in Memphis. Give resource links.

I like SearXNG,brave search and mojeek. I understand the controversies with Brave but it's the only good one I can find.

SearXNG works flawlessly....

I replaced SearxNG with degoog on my server. Feels very much like Google, yet it is not. I did enable Google for search results and image, but it refuses to work (good). Am using DuckDuckGo and Startpage instead, through degoog, of course.

All of this when you get the super excellent Kagi for 10 dollars, from an actual search company that values privacy.

Its exactly what everyone wants but no, can't pay 10 dollars I guess. :)

just don't "google it".

I just gave up on searxng too.