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This Guy Has Built an Open Source Search Engine as an Alternative to Google in His Spare Time (www.404media.co)

submitted 9 months ago by noodlejetski@lemm.ee to c/foss@beehaw.org

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"I found it very weird that there essentially is no way to browse the web in an open manner. So that's what I am trying to build," the founder of Stract said.

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[–] millie@beehaw.org 17 points 9 months ago (2 children)

This seems cool, and it's nice to see people creating alternatives to google, but I probably won't end up using it.

Over the past few months I've tried both DuckDuckGo and Kagi. Both are decent for a lot of things, and Kagi has some really nice features, but in practice they've just taught me that I actually want my search engine to know a bit about me.

If I'm looking for something in the area on a google search, I can literally just search the thing. Google already knows where I am and knows what context I'm probably looking for, so it gets me to important results faster. While that might not be particularly useful for areas where Kagi's tools shine (like research), it turns out that a ton of my searches are just basic stuff like looking for store hours and phone numbers. In both cases I found myself getting frustrated with not having google as my default, requiring a bunch of extra typing or a manual switch of search engines.

I'd love to get a viable replacement for google, but realizing how much my searching benefits from their massive pile of data on me, I don't know that I'll actually find one without that. It is nice to have an alternative if results get too personalized or if I want to check against like a baseline search, but search is the one place I've tried to get away from google that I keep going back.

I definitely am glad I got away from them for email and document storage, though.

[–] tiago@beehaw.org 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It's the predicament between choosing convenience or privacy. Apart from local businesses, what other searches have you found are improved by them having your data? For me, it's money exchange rates.

(What alternatives do you use for email and storage, though?)

[–] millie@beehaw.org 3 points 9 months ago

Searches that require some context are often a lot easier to find. Like, if I'm searching for something D&D related, I rarely have to specify that that's what I'm looking for. If it's on wikidot, it'll come up right away. Even for pretty generic words like 'web' or 'death', it knows I'm looking for the spell on the one hand and the cleric domain on the other, just because I've searched for so much D&D stuff and done so over and over again.

For mail I use Proton, for backup I use iDrive. I'm pretty happy with both.