this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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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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[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 16 hours ago

Damn you guys sure have a big list of search engines

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago

YaCy Marginalia.nu

[–] klu9 2 points 22 hours ago (1 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/ )

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Thank you! Thats a hell of a big list!

[–] klu9 2 points 20 hours ago

You're welcome. I'm still trying out a few, including Yep and the SearchXNG instance that comes built into Firedragon browser.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day 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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

I haven’t even decided on a name yet

Cheeky: Fedderccini, feddiserch

Better: LookN4

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago
[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 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/

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (1 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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think there is some postprocessing but yeah it uses Bing. I simply meant that SearXG uses its results (and Bing too for that matter). So it's layers all the way down.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Thanks for the explanation. I'm always learning here.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Just an FYI, but this domain appears to be on HaGeZi's Badware Hoster Blocklist

Edit: ah, I see now. Its a free webhost so there may be badware hosted elsewhere on it

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 days ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Seems to be using searXNG. Routes the search query to different instances

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

yes, lot of folks dont know where to start with searxng so this is nice and simple and just works

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

Awsome thank you!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This is actually super cool.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

I gotta shout out trom when I can, they're doing great work

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

wow, thanks for sharing, that's awesome

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

Maybe Stract?

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days 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.

[–] phanto 4 points 2 days 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Ill give this a shot! Thanks for the recommendation!