Technology

This is a copy/pasted message I wrote up on another thread. As long as there are people in the comments shilling kagi, I will shill my prefered engines. At least my suggestions will bring awareness to free as in freedom projects. I hope to god people paying 10$/month just to not get datacucked by search engines will also learn something and save their money.

SearX/SearXNG is a free and open source, highly customizable, and self-hostable meta search engine. SearX instances act as a middle man, they query other search engines for you, stripping all their spyware ad crap and never having your connection touch their servers. Of course you have to trust the SearX instance host with your query information, but again if you are that paranoid just self host.

I personally trust some foss loving sysadmin that host social services for free out of alturism, who also accepts hosting donations, whos server is located on the other side of the planet, with my query info over Google/Alphabet any day.

Its nice to be able to email and have a human conversation with your search engine provider thats just a knowlegable every day joe who genuinely believes in the project and freely dedicates their resources to it. Consider sending some cash their way to help with upkeep if you like the services they provide, they will probably appreciate and make use of that 10$ better than kagi.

Heres a list of all public searx instances, I personally prefer to use paulgo.io All SearX instances are configured different to index different engines. If one doesn't seem to give good results try a few others.

Did I mention it has bangs like duckduckgo? If you really need google like for maps and buisness info just use !!g in the query

search.marginalia.nu is a completely novel search engine written and hosted by one dude that aims to prioritize indexing lighter websites little to no javascript as these tend to be personal websites and homepages that have poor SEO and the big search engines won't index well. If you remember the internet of the early 2000s and want a nostalgia trip this ones for you. Its also open source and self-hostable

Finally, YaCy is another completely novel search engine that uses peer-to-peer technology to power a big webcrawler which prioritizes indexes based off user queries and feedback. Everyone can download yacy and devote a bit of their computing power to both run their own local instance and help out a collective search engine. Companies can also download yacy and use it to index their private intranets.

They have a public instance available through a web portal. To be upfront, YaCy is not a great search engine for what most people usually want, which is quick and relevant information within the first few clicks. But, it is an interesting use of technology and what a true honest-to-god community-operated search engine looks like untainted by SEO scores or corporate money-making shenanigans.

I hope this has been informative to those who believe theres only a few options to pick from, I know these options are so unknown to most people.

Wow, USB-C and DDG in the same year? Look at Apple trying to stay relevant 😉

Surprised to see so many plugging kagi in this thread. A subscription to search the internet seems crazy to me. Is it that good?

Doesn't Google pay billions to Apple for the top spot? Why would they want to lose that stream of free cash?

I mean, it makes sense, DDG already use apple maps for their maps platform.

I started using duck duck go a few months ago and have felt like my search results are a lot more useful since.

The maps function on it sucks though

Duck duck go sucks for porn I stopped using it a while ago. Until they fix that I'm out.

I’ve been using it this way for years. I don’t use google products at all now and don’t miss it.

I've been using duckduckgo for the last month and change and I'm not really a fan. Especially for things here in Japan, it can give really wonky results (today I was looking for the closest post office and searched '\ post office'. It gave me a website to get directions, but no indication of where it might be nor, y'know, even the post office's website). Google has gotten continually worse for me, but this was, in most cases, just barely as good or worse.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Oct 4 (Reuters) - Apple (AAPL.O) held talks with DuckDuckGo to replace Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) Google as the default search engine for the private mode on Apple's Safari browser, the Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the discussions.

The details of the talks are expected to be released later this week, according to the report, after Judge Amit Mehta, overseeing a federal antitrust suit against Google, ruled on Wednesday that he would unseal the testimony of DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg and Apple executive John Giannandrea.

Apple, DuckDuckGo and Google did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice in a landmark U.S. trial argued Google, which has some 90% of the search market, illegally paid $10 billion annually to smartphone makers such as Apple and wireless carriers like AT&T (T.N) and others to be the default in search on their devices in order to stay on top.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified on Monday, saying that tech giants were competing for vast troves of content needed to train artificial intelligence, and complained Google was locking up content with expensive and exclusive deals with publishers.

He added that Microsoft had sought to make its Bing search engine the default on Apple smartphones but was rebuffed.

The original article contains 241 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 11%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Duck duck go needs a lot of work to replace Google search.

I've used it for years but often I still get the shits and just bring Google up after duck duck go fails to find what I'm looking for.

On Safari (iOS), Apple makes it easy to switch. Settings > Safari > Search Engine and select which one you want. I’ve been using DDG not quite a year and at first the change felt a lil jarring, but knowing I’m contributing less to Google’s ad revenue and their long list of privacy violations, I’m comfortable now sticking with DDG. Change isn’t always easy, convenient, or comfortable, but it can be done with just the tiniest bit of effort.