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this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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This is a copy/pasted message I wrote up on another thread. As long as there are people in the comments shilling kagi, I will shill my prefered engines. At least my suggestions will bring awareness to free as in freedom projects. I hope to god people paying 10$/month just to not get datacucked by search engines will also learn something and save their money.
SearX/SearXNG is a free and open source, highly customizable, and self-hostable meta search engine. SearX instances act as a middle man, they query other search engines for you, stripping all their spyware ad crap and never having your connection touch their servers. Of course you have to trust the SearX instance host with your query information, but again if you are that paranoid just self host.
I personally trust some foss loving sysadmin that host social services for free out of alturism, who also accepts hosting donations, whos server is located on the other side of the planet, with my query info over Google/Alphabet any day.
Its nice to be able to email and have a human conversation with your search engine provider thats just a knowlegable every day joe who genuinely believes in the project and freely dedicates their resources to it. Consider sending some cash their way to help with upkeep if you like the services they provide, they will probably appreciate and make use of that 10$ better than kagi.
Heres a list of all public searx instances, I personally prefer to use paulgo.io All SearX instances are configured different to index different engines. If one doesn't seem to give good results try a few others.
Did I mention it has bangs like duckduckgo? If you really need google like for maps and buisness info just use !!g in the query
search.marginalia.nu is a completely novel search engine written and hosted by one dude that aims to prioritize indexing lighter websites little to no javascript as these tend to be personal websites and homepages that have poor SEO and the big search engines won't index well. If you remember the internet of the early 2000s and want a nostalgia trip this ones for you. Its also open source and self-hostable
Finally, YaCy is another completely novel search engine that uses peer-to-peer technology to power a big webcrawler which prioritizes indexes based off user queries and feedback. Everyone can download yacy and devote a bit of their computing power to both run their own local instance and help out a collective search engine. Companies can also download yacy and use it to index their private intranets.
They have a public instance available through a web portal. To be upfront, YaCy is not a great search engine for what most people usually want, which is quick and relevant information within the first few clicks. But, it is an interesting use of technology and what a true honest-to-god community-operated search engine looks like untainted by SEO scores or corporate money-making shenanigans.
I hope this has been informative to those who believe theres only a few options to pick from, I know these options are so unknown to most people.
Thank you! I'm intrigued by Kagi but it's a lot of money. I've tried SearXNG before it wasn't great for me, I'll try it again.
I hope you find more success with it this time. Like I said not all SearXNG instances are equal paulgo.io was the first to really click with me and give useful results. Some SearXNG instances won't query google or most other engines making their usefulness rather limited. Also the more popular an instance becomes the more likely it will be rate-limited by search engines which isn't the fault of the instance but can be an occasional annoyance for sure. Not perfect solution by any means but I think SearX would be a great fit for lots of people here who just want google results without all the spyware ad bs
Nice choice of lemmy instance, btw. Pubnixes like SDF rule!
Genuine question, what happens to SearX if google pulls the plug on API access or changes the algorithm in a way that makes it worse?
If Kagi got an actual code audit done I would be a lot more on board with it. The audit they do show appears to just be penetration testing, not focused on the code itself but I don't know much about so maybe there is more to it that I don't understand.
I wish it were easier for developers to monetize their projects while leaving them open source. Tutanota is a good example of open source code used in a paid service. With tutanota however it seems like what you pay for is the service, not the software.
I am not the most knowledgeable person on searxng innerworkings so may be wrong, but searxng instances usually use the 'get' and 'post' commands to request+fetch http/https content not an API key. You can get your own api keys/tokens from google and plug them in to searx in the preferences menu if they ever make it API only. There's a lot of IT academic research that relies on google they will most likely never pull API access fullstop but you never you I guess.
There is not much if anything SearXNG instances can do if google changes algorithm. In worst case scenario it can still index other search engines which themselves scrape google like startpage or engines completely independent like duckduckgo, bing, brave, YaCy, ect. Here is a list of all configured engines SearXNG uses by default you can go into preferences at top right of searXNG to configure what engines you want to use among other things.
It just worries me that there isn't really a google competitor if all the alternatives rely on google not screwing up a product. It seems like honest search results are becoming less of a thing they care about.