Im noticing its harder and harder to find things on google. Searching for a companies quarterly profits, cost of medical care for all per capita, and othet economic details are all getting more and more buried in google. Just asking how other contries do their social programs results in us based opionion articles…like wtf are we even doing.
I understand scrolling and indexing sites is an enormous undertaking. Is there currently a federated open source search engine? If not is their a potential to create one?
Is there a trustworthy private option?
This probably doesn’t help immediately, but I’ve been working on a platform that does federated search (among other things) for the last year. It’s in private friends-and-family testing and won’t be available for general use for at least a couple more months.
I haven’t even decided on a name yet, but I promise to make a lot of noise about it once it’s in public beta
Maybe Stract?
It’s open source and has its own search index.
There is SearXNG, it’s open source and decentralized but AFAIK the different instances don’t really share information between them. I’m personally interested in trying it, but I’m apprehensive about the fact that it’s really hard to know whether a particular instance is trustworthy, and while it’s possible I don’t think it makes much sense to host it myself.
I’ll add that it’s a meta-search engine rather than something that does the actual searching itself. That’s still useful, but you’re limited by the quality of the upstream search engines (including google, duckduckgo, qwant, etc).
The gain from self-hosting is that you have more control over the results, and can do things like redirect social media sites to privacy friendly alternatives, and create your own bangs (or even add your own custom search engines).
Probably not a massive privacy gain though, although if you host the instance behind a privacy VPN queries won’t be associated with your IP at least.
Does DDG really generate its own searches? I was under the impression that it uses the Bing API. Maybe that’s outdated or only applies to certain types of search?
Seems to be using searXNG. Routes the search query to different instances
yes, lot of folks dont know where to start with searxng so this is nice and simple and just works
wow, thanks for sharing, that’s awesome
Awsome thank you!
Here’s one Mwmbl
