Been slowly running into more results from DDG that seem to have some “personal parameter” or difference in search results. I had a search saved from some months ago, went to check it for some references and got new hits involving local organizations that had nothing to do with the search. Opening up a private browser I see that the searches aren’t 100% matching up either.
I see this as only getting worse, I want to be able to enter a search and it searches for my query. Not based on my personality or whatever info is being collected. Does anyone know a search engine that’s reliable and focuses on giving the same results and doesn’t try this “personalized” crap?
I had been using DDG for years but switched to SearXNG last fall after reading about it on Lemmy. It’s a privacy focused meta-search engine that can even be self-hosted. It’s wildly customizable and I’ve been pretty happy with the results.
If you’re not interested in self-hosting, or just want to test drive it a bit, there are lots of public instances you can use as well.
Man I fucking love this community sometimes. This is like the 5th fantastic self hostable open source software I’ve seen since joining lemmy, and every time, it gives me that feeling of discovering the internet all over again.
I’m clearly not understanding something here, but I thought search engines would require loads of space to index all the internet. Just thinking about the ability to search for code on stackoverflow seems like loads already.
Edit:
Found it!
SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled.
Looks very interesting, thanks for commenting about it.