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?

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[–] 36 points 2 years ago* (6 children)

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.

https://searx.space/

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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 Maybe that's outdated or only applies to certain types of search?

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago (8 children)
  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    Great product, but why did they pick such a terrible domain? This is hard to remember. Search engines built their empires off of easily memorized names, which is an excellent model to follow.

    Update: Oh, I see, it's all based on trom.tf. That's quite the range of services... seems way too ambitious to be sustainable, though, especially the YouTube competitor...

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    There is yacy
    It's not the most accurate but you can help by adding a server or client to the mix.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    I've taken a couple of shots at yacy, but have little luck. It's possible to self host a searxng in docker that uses almost no resources. I use a server, but a buddy literally has it load on startup in his Windows.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    Maybe Stract?

    It's open source and has its own search index.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago
    [–] 2 points 2 years ago
    [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    A whole bunch of alternatives here, a few federated, quite a few open source:

    https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/

    (Found via https://marginalia-search.com/ )

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    YaCy Marginalia.nu

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Damn you guys sure have a big list of search engines

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