Was wondering what the hell was going on this morning.
I always thought that people using searx etc over duckduckgo were just gluttons for punishment. Having gone an entire morning without search, maybe now is the time to dive down that rabbit hole…
I’m one of those guys. Searx itself is just a meta search engine, using Google and many other search engines. You don’t need to dive into any rabbit hole, just use a pre existing server for easy access. From time to time I switch the instance. You can then still decide if you want go the full rabbit hole and host it yourself, but that is not a requirement. At least its fully open source and your data/search queries are not sent to Google or Microsoft. In the settings can be specified which engines you want to use:
Try it out here: https://searx.space/ and for some information about SearxNG: https://docs.searxng.org/
Wait, it supports bangs? That’s the #1 thing that keeps me specifically with DDG, once i have some time i’ll have to explore this (probably not earlier than a couple weeks though)
I was used to the bangs in DuckDuckGo too, but stopped using them. In example I have duckduckgo search engine disabled here, but can still do a ddg only search with !ddg hello
. But don’t get your hopes too high, because I think it only supports the few bangs and nothing else. It does not support ddg bangs. I registered a DuckDuckGo bang !retro
to point to RetroPie forum, but it does not work in Searx.
Edit: It would have been a true banger if we could combine them in Searx like this: !ddg!retro
Google, Bing, and a plethora of others.
Seems like most search engines these days are primarily Google-based or Bing-based. Mojeek has its own crawler, I think…
Kagi.com has its own I believe. But you have to pay a subscription to use it.
My understanding is that Kagi relies on the likes of Bing and Google but since it uses more than one of them it can keep functioning if one goes down.
This is correct, we are independent and have been since all the way back in 2004, 8bn-page index and growing 😀
I just read your profile and can’t believe you guys have been on lemmy for 3 years. What made you guys join before lemmy got popular?
Alexandria and Stract use their own open source crawlers. Brave is also independent, if I recall correctly.