I wish there was a search engine that only searched text based websites or at least sites that don't have ads. 90s internet was amazing. Tons of websites ran by average people passionate about their interests, giving oral histories about things. Our computers were screaming, trying to tell us not to lose sight of what it was meant for.

[–] gh0stcassette@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 16 hours ago

Wiby and searchmysite are basically this. I have them as backends for my SearXNG instance, in addition to mojeek, qwant, startpage, duckduckgo, and brave search. Put together, it's basically as good as Google was before it got enshittified to all fuck.

[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

I wish there was a search engine that only searched text based websites or at least sites that don’t have ads.

When you use Lynx Browser, everything on the internet is text:

[–] BlueberryWalnut@sopuli.xyz 10 points 3 days ago

Project Gemini (not related to google)

[–] mobyduck648@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I think Kagi has a 'small web' feature.

[–] lastlybutfirstly@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Kagi looks like it's part of the problem. It exactly looks like that 2000s meme that showed a dystopian future where Comcast sells websites like cable channels.

https://kagi.com/pricing

[–] mobyduck648@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

The whole point is that you're paying them as a service rather than them using you as a feedstock for the ad industry. I don't object to paying for search personally.