I use Duckduckgo, but I realised these big(ish) search engines give me all the commercialised results. Duckduckgo has been going down the slope for years, but not at such a rate as Google or Bing has.
I want to have a search engine that gives me all the small blogs and personal sites.
Does something like this exist?
I make one for web dev and mastodon.
I’m building my own. Keep you posted.
Try this engine
Or a SearXNG instance
https://search.disroot.org/search
You may also be interested in the Indie Web movement. This site is a great resource for it, with yet more links to indie sites and blogs.
Finally, not quite what you asked but here’s a freebie, in case you didn’t know about it:
It’s an old web search engine. It only indexes pages from the 00s and earlier.
Ah Marginalia is absolutely awesome! I feel like modern search is almost an extension of website names now, so if I want to find netflix but don’t know it’s website, I might search for “netflix”. Marginalia is actually a cool way to find new stuff- like you can search “bike maintenance” and find cool blog posts about that topic.
I honestly can’t remember if that’s something google and the like used to do, but doesn’t now, or if they never did. Either way, I love it!
Aside from SearXNG, I didn’t know about these search engines until your recommendation. Thanks to Wiby and Marginalia, I found old rich content (old BBS list conversations, for example) that I was looking for, regarding studies on the occult and esotericism. Thank you so much!
The more obscure a web page is, the more likely it is to be indexed only by the large search engines (i.e. Google). There are search queries that return 0 results on DDG, but quite a few (relatively) obscure websites on Google. This is simply because the more money a search engine operator has, the more websites it will index.
So what you want is kind of contradictory.
Although Google indeed is the greatest indexer of the World Wide Web, unfortunately, the SEO and the AI makes it so hard to find something, for example, from before 2000s, such as BBS List archives, old blogosphere and personal webpages from that time, simply because they had no modern SEO nor AI keywords at that time. These old content are entirely free from AI-generated slop, (almost) free from dis- and mis-informations (because, at the time of BBS and Gopher, the Internet was still being born, and books were the main source of knowledge), so old content is sine qua non for one that’s seeking real knowledge.
(almost) free from dis- and mis-informations (because, at the time of BBS and Gopher, the Internet was still being born
Yeah, no. There was tons of bullshit. I ran across a post back then saying you could get psychic powers by eating the Americium sensor in your fire detector.
If you want blogs, I recommend you use gemini: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
Download Lagrange and begin browsing. It’s basically a small-web of personal blogs.
it’s of course great! But not really an alternative to the current web search engine… Do you have a search engine for Gemini?
