Now that Google is slowly but surely going to shits, i’m searching for a new search engine, and i was thinking, of going the extra mile and hosting my own, decentralized one, but which one should i choose (YACY, Presearch or Seeks), or are all of them not there yet?
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I wrote a guide on here about the differences between alternative search engines. I recommend for you either YaCy or marginalia.nu. searxng supports calling YaCy (I actually contributed to that feature on the github).
The problem with decentralized engines like marginalia and YaCy is that they aren’t good at the things a average user wants from a typical search engine. Ideally a search engine is meant to quickly provide you links to webpages which are strongly related in content to you are looking for. Shopping, weather, map directions, local business hours. On some level you need to prioritize showing the user what they want ideally within the first few results.
Decentralized engines by their nature don’t do this easily. Instead using YaCy or marginalia feels like a scavenger hunt where you get handed a page of random websites loosely connected by your keyword search term and are told to start looking. This is good when your in the mood for blogspam and personal webpage blog dicovery, but not great for finding local buisniess info quickly. YaCy has a user curated priority system but not enough user mass adoption to be worth a damn in practice.
So sadly if you want anything resembling google or bing results for your practical convinence driven daily internet searching needs, you need to scrape them with searxng or use one of their few real search engine company competitors funding their own indexers and web crawlers. So really your options are scraping google, bing, mojeek, qwant, kagi and DuckDuckGo(ish they still use bing for indexing a lot).
Out of those Ive actually warmed up to Kagi over the year. I was put off at the idea of subscription based internet search but its a really good service they provide and they line out their reasoning for pricing well. They seem to be using that monthly sub money to actually improve the service and user experiences while remaining transparent with constant changelogs and blog updates. Kagis recent implimentation of privacy pass protocol, available TOR access, anonymous payment options, and taking fediverse + small net indexing seriously are all green flags to me. Never thought I would pay for a search engine but the way the world is going I’d rather eat the equivalent of a 5-10$ patreon sub to grow a service I believe is respecting me as a customer over fucking FAANG treating me like cattle and absolutely violating user experience so hard just for another nickles worth value in data scraping.
Yeah, I’ve been experimenting with YaCy, and discovered they have a PageRank-like algorithm, but it uses a lot of resources, so they don’t recommend using it and it’s turned off by default. Haven’t tried turning it on myself. Looks like the maintainer is focusing on YaCy Grid, meant for organizations, not general decentralized search.
I’ve been using different versions of SearX for a long while (sometimes on my server, sometimes through a provider like Disroot) as my standard search engine, since I’ve never had great luck with the big names, and it’s decent, but between upstream provider quota limits, and just the fact that it relies on corporate search APIs at all, sometimes the quality craters.
While I haven’t had the energy to run YaCy on my own, and public instances tend to not have a long life, I don’t have nearly as much experience with it, but when I have gotten to try it out, the search itself looked great, but generally didn’t have as broad or current an index. Long-term, though, it (and its protocol) is probably going to be the way to go, if only because a company can’t randomly tank it like they can with the meta-search systems or their own interfaces.
Looking at Presearch for the first time now, the search results look almost surprisingly good if poorly sorted, but the fact that I now know orders of magnitude more about their finances and their cryptocurrency token than what and how the thing actually searches makes me worry a bit about its future.
I’ve run yacy and searxng, and I find yacy flaky. I get really random search results, often not useful at all. I like Searxng though, although once in a while I have to hit refresh to get my result. Probably a simple fix, I’ve just never bothered to go down the rabbit hole.
Not decentralized, but I have been using Kagi for around six months and it has changed the way I view the internet for the better. I love how you can also rank sites you trust higher so they appear in more searches. The only problem I have had is searching for shopping links here in Japan sometimes is a little wonky, so I still will use google when I want to just see how much an item costs on average online.
I have never thought about decentralized search. Could be an interesting rabbit hole to fall into.
I have tried none of those that you mentioned, but over heard good things about SearX. Sorry that I can’t be more helpful.
I just did a quick dive into this and have some concerns. SearX appears to no longer be maintained and was last updated three years ago. SearXNG was forked to use more recent libraries but there were concerns that those are not always stable or fully vetted. There were also concerns that SearXNG did not follow the same concerns for user privacy. It’s a shame that SearX shut down, that one actually sounds like a project I would have jumped on.
I host a SearXNG instance and follow the Matrix channel. Haven’t seen anything along those lines.
This is very vague tbh. I love a good tin foil but you gonna need to give me something to work with.
They’re likely referring to the sentences outlining the differences between searx and SearXNG in searX README (archived Github repo). I think it was about some feature to report bugs to the project. And NG having a faster pace of development.
Yep, that’s exactly what I was looking at (https://github.com/searx/searx). As I said, it was a QUICK dive but the wording was enough to make me shy away from it. For all the years I’ve been running servers, I won’t put up anything that requires the latest/greatest of any code because that’s where about 90% of the zero-days seem to come from. Almost all the big ones I’ve seen in the last few years where things that made me panic until I realized that oh, if your updates are more than a year old then none of this affects you. And the one that DID affect me had already been updated through a security release.
I think as written, I’d say these words are more FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt)
And I’ve been running servers for quite some time as well. SearXNG seems rock solid. And it’s tested. And when I had security issues in general, it was because we didn’t do timely updates. I haven’t really ever been affected by zero days in my hobby linux endeavours. Okay, we had a few nasty things in some more fundamental building blocks and sometimes people using slower distributions had been fine… But I don’t think it applies here. With these kinds of things, the latest stable release is your best bet. Not a previous version with bugs in it, which have been fixed since. And especially not an unmaintained project.
Yeah? OK well it’s certainly worth taking a closer look at, and I was also doing some reading on Yacy. I’ve run one in the past called mnogosearch, with a lot of customization, but it would be nice to get into a community project like this.
Google was already shit for years. Its purpose nowadays is not to deliver whatever search results the user requested, it’s purpose is to keep the user dangling so that he clicks on one of the sponsored links - that’s money.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason you won’t find anything anymore on Google.
You can try DuckDuckGo. They are pretty open on what they do. The search engine is Bing and the maps come from Apple and you can chose your preferred AI from a list.
I haven’t heard about the decentralized search engines. Are they any good? Or are they more in like a proof of concept stage?
It seems like only YaCy is an independent search engine in this list and not some Metasearchengine
Now that Google is slowly but surely going to shits
I am using whoogle as a front end for Google search, I want to set up searx but don’t have the skill right now.
Presearch
Advertisers can stake their PRE [crypto tokens] to a keyword, and whichever advertiser stakes the most tokens will have its ads displayed when a user searches on the term selected. Advertisers confer the most external value on PRE, so their success is very important to the ecosystem.
So crypto currency and advertising? Hard pass.
I’ve tried Yacy plenty of times in the past. It seems to get the job done the best, in my opinion, and gives you a lot of control.
But is it decentralized? Do the results from multiple spiders get added to give everyone the same quality searches or do I need to scan the whole internet myself?
[edit] I was looking at this earlier and couldn’t find the info. Started searching again just now and found it immediately… of course… (The answer is YES)
Yeah. There’s a whole section dedicated to showing varies nodes in the network.
Now that Google is slowly but surely going to shits,
Slowly? Did you just wake from a coma from 2013? Because if so…literally nothing about life is about to make sense. I mean, not even talking about search engines anymore. You went into a coma with a black president trying to get healthcare for all Americans, and woke up to the bad timeline from Back To The Future II. Except in this reality, it’s even worse. Even Biff never gave nazi salutes…
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Google has gone to shit, but it’s the only webpage I can click with one hand, that allows me to hit the microphone button and ask it to search for something for me, whilst in a reclining position. Bing just started doing that too, it’s Bing is fucking completely unusable. There’s no free voice control add on for Firefox anymore, after they shitcanned it years ago.
