So I’ve tried out a few search engines but no matter where I look I can’t find a great answer.
- Qwant was decent for a bit but as I eventually found out they don’t use their own index.
- SearXNG, same as above.
- Mojeek was one of the first I went with but I often can’t find what I’m looking for when using it.
- Wikipedia gives me YaCy, Exalead, Opensearch, Gigablast, and Elasticsearch but either I can’t find the URL’s for them or they require I install something on my computer.
What did you all end up picking? And does it even matter if the back-end is American owned, do American companies make money from that (or does that give them inordinate control)?
I’m on duckduckgo, which is American, but is a relatively small private company that doesn’t seem to be actively participating in global evil as far as I can tell.
They are still powered by Bing. As in, they get their results from bing, and not their own index.
I just recently learned that, but DDG is also the search engine I mostly use.
Sorry if there are typos
Honestly, I’d stick with Qwant. I know right now it is still using Google but between them and Ecosia they’re creating a European index.
I’d rather support them now and show we really do want this.
Ecosia and Qwant work great for me, both are working together on their own search engine releasing this year in France and Germany and hopefully globally next year
I use Ecosia, while I understand it uses the Google and Bing results I am glad to hear they are working with another french company to index the web. I personally use pihole to block the ads but I know it goes against Ecosia’s mission.
Ecosia works great for me.
Kagi is a different approach, but it’s also American so it doesn’t help here. Many AI LLMs are effectively hyper optimized search engines, and there are at least non-US controlled LLMs you can try. But for traditional web search, the entire world was happy to let Google dominate the space, while Microsoft spent billions to chase a distant second place. There is very little oxygen left for any other competitors and the remaining slice of the pie is so small and the barrier to entry so high it’s basically impossible for anyone else to be effective nevermind profitable.
Edit: It’s also worth mentioning the EU is trying to do something about this but in typical European bureaucratic/academic fashion I can’t make heads or tails of what exactly they want to do and frankly it doesn’t sound like they know either, probably in a few decades they’ll have built something really impressive.
Dunno about other search engines, but Opensearch and Elasticsearch are databases, not search engines. (Openseach is a fork of Elasticsearch, actually.)
[angry wikipedia moderator noises]
They’re literally search engines. They’re just not ones that come with an index of the web.
Literally, yes. They are engines that search data. You could index the web on them if you really wanted.
As to how they are used, correctly or not, I consider them closer to databases than “search engines” in the context of this post.
Seeing ES or OS in the same category as Gigasearch needed some distinction though.
Gigablast used to be great, but they vanished with no warning a few years ago. It was run by a small team, or maybe one guy, who posted frequently about how difficult it was to make a search engine when so many sites block them now (but don’t block Google.) So, I think maybe he just decided it wasn’t worth it anymore.
I use Kagi. It’s an American company that has their own index and also delegates their searches to other providers. They’re not very competent but the search engine works quite well
