• smb@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    🤔 maybe there is a lack of distributed fediversed search engine instances where:

    1. everyone can host a search engine for their very own pages
    2. everyone can crawl other pages and provide (maybe with permissions) the crawled data to other search engines (as compressed snapshots, api …) or provide a search engine by themselves for all.
    3. such search engines can be ranked or marked with “has anti features xyz” and put into followable ‘collections’ per topics.
    4. possibility to add 3rd party rankings and filters, so that one can use only a subset of a search engine list that was pieced together by someone you know or trust, reduced by rankings or filters published by another one you somehow trust to limit the items in the first list.

    then: “for software development i use linuz personal ‘devel’ collection, this way i don’t have to manually click through big G’s gigabytes of spamalads they always only frustrate you with. for my home projects i use my friends ‘home of DYO’ collection, i get more results than i need but get new ideas as well. for kids its awesome, our school provides a collection including specialized search instances that fit learning, while that collection is also reviewed by a company to not contain search engine instances that also index any unfitting content pages.”

    oh btw: no i have no info about duckduckgo unfortunately 🤷‍♀️

  • Firebirdie713@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    I picked a good day to switch to SwissCow lol

    https://swisscows.com/en/web?query=%s

    Free, uses it’s own index, focus on privacy. If there is anything bad about it though, please let me know. It can be hard to find unbiased data on search engines when you ultimately need to use a search engine to find the info, ime.

  • qyron@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Okay.

    Now that we already know we are pretty much at the hands of one pupeteer, what options are there?

    I already read about Kagi (apologies if mispelled) but I like to write as a hobby and 300 searches per month go fast.

    What other options are there?

    • jol@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Was this news to you? Other than Google and Bing there aren’t any other significant alternatives. Even brave is a bit limited.

    • sugartits@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Just pay the extra for unlimited searches. It’s not much money, especially if it’s a tool for work.

      • qyron@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        It’s a hobby as it is.

        If I ever manage to sell enough copies of it to be able to pay for a Kagi subscription, I’ll do it and make it public knowledge.

      • Jarix@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        Listen sugartits, some of us don’t have much money. So if it’s not much money we still don’t have it

        (Mostly i just wanted to point out your username by using it in a comment)

        • qyron@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          That was one of the most out of the blue comments I have ever read. It sounded so… unreal. Something out of a sitcom. Then I read “sugartits” is the name of the lemmy you were replying to. That’s was really top mark. Kudos for you.

    • Evehn@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Just letting you know kagi has a family plan with unlimited searches, so you can probably split it with family or friends! I have yet to see how searxng search holds up to kagi.

    • Scrollone@feddit.itEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      There’s a new search engine called Yep, made by the team at Ahrefs, a SEO tool SaaS.

      It looks promising because they have their own index, but it’s a bit slow sometimes.

      • noodlejetski@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        We may collect aggregated, non-personal search data to improve search algorithms, train AI models

        ugh

    • joneskind@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      That’s a nice hobby

      I would suggest you to install a local instance of a LLM (mistral or llama3 for example) to widen your source of information. Go straight to Wikipedia instead of “googling” it if you don’t already.

      Anyway, I didn’t know about kagi so I might take my own advice and give it a try.

    • Garry@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Brave search is independent. It was trained with google search but now it’s a thing of its own and doesn’t rely on google. I switched from DuckDuckGo a year ago and haven’t looked back

    • Shellbeach@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      I jumped back on ecosia. It’s nice there, but I’m sure there are issues that a non tech person like me may not know about

        • Twig@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          It is. That or it was very coincidentally down for the exact amount of time as DDG.

      • Mojeek@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        you can also send us in queries where we’re not perfect, or let us know elsewhere, and we’re keen on fixing them

  • kia@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Apparently the whole ecosystem is down… DDG, Bing, etc.

    • ekZepp@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Now we know what happen when someone in Google pray their AI Overlord to increase Google search traffic

      …the AI just cut down the competition.

  • HornedMeatBeast@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    I thought it was just me, I thought something wrong was going on in my Windows installation.

    EA app is also dead in the water for me, my library is not loading. It knows I have 4 games installed but all the names and icons are blank.

    Can’t even launch the games directly from their own exe.