I just found this search engine while searching for something like Kagi.
It seems like it is not a meta search engine, but one with its own index. Awesome.
It has kagi’s manual website ranking. It even has so called optics (like Kagi’s lenses), for example an optic for the Fediverse lets you search only the fediverse.
What do you think?
I like it but it seems they have to crawl a bit more.
Love the idea, but just ran a few comparisons against Kagi and it fared abysmally.
I still use DDG as my “daily driver” (I know there are better options for privacy and avoiding big tech, but I haven’t yet found anything independent that is good enough for me to switch to full time yet). I bookmarked Stract a while back, and it proved useful a few months back when Microsoft had an outage that took down Bing and by extension, Duck Duck Go. I do like Stract, their index seems to be enough larger than MoJeek (another independent search with their own index) that it gives me better results.
Stract might not be as open as I’d like, but it’s nice to have as an option, and I’m never going to complain about having more search providers with independent indexes.
Cool idea, love more competition in this space!
I was unfortunately disappointed by the first query I did. I searched for “Norway” and did not get any good results. I expected Wikipedia or something similar, but did not get anything good. Maybe I used it wrong?
Just as a warning, this is licensed under the AGPL, with a CLA that requires copyright assignment. So, they could pull the rug at any time:
2.3 Outbound License. Based on the grant of rights in Sections 2.1 and 2.2, if We include Your Contribution in a Material, We may license the Contribution under any license, including copyleft, permissive, commercial, or proprietary licenses.
Quickest peak and then utter vanishing of any interest in a project I’ve had in a while.
Wouldn’t mind something a little more open than SearXNG in that it owns it’s own database, but requiring that they be the sole owner of anything anyone contributes AND having the ability to yank the rug at any time they feel like it pretty much puts it in the meh-who-cares category.
Had enough stupid shit yanked over the past few years that I really just don’t care or have time to deal with any that is already prepping for their eventual enshittification.
I’m not sure if you people are paying attention to the right thing. It’s fairly common to do this. And it doesn’t mean they can take away anything. Everything will still be AGPL and still available. Someone is then going to fork it and maintain it as it happened with lots of other projects. This just means they’re also able to also sell it under different conditions, including your patches and contributions.
I think what you should pay attention to is, whether the search index is open or closed. That’s something with significant impact. Not if they’re able to monetize your small bugfix without paying you. I mean that’d be nice, too. But not a super big thing unless you contribute a substancial amount of code. I mean you get a whole open source search engine in return for signing away your copyright. And it doesn’t change anything for the people using the software. For them it’s still AGPL. And the maintainer could stop developing the software at any point, anyways. Could (and does) also happen to projects without a CLA.
And it doesn’t mean they can take away anything.
Not if they’re able to monetize your small bugfix
The problem is they can, and that’s not the point - I don’t care if you make money with something I spent my time on willingly, I care that you’re forcing me to say you’re the full and sole owner of my contributions and can do whatever you want at any point in the future with them.
Signing a CLA puts the full ownership of the code in the hands of whomever you’ve signed the CLA with which means they have the full ability and legal right to do any damn thing they want, which often includes telling you to fuck yourself, changing the license, and running off to make a commercial product while both killing the AGPLed version, and fucking everyone who spent any time on it.
If you have a CLA, I don’t care if your project gives out free handjobs: I don’t want it anywhere near anything I’m going to either be using or have to maintain.
And sure you can fork from before the license change, but I’m unwilling to put a major piece of software into my workflows and hope that, if something happens, someone will come along and continue working on it.
Frankly, I’m of the opinion that if you’re setting up a project and make the very, very involved decision to go with a CLA and spend the time implementing one, you’re spending that time because you’ve already determined it’s probably in your interests later to do a rugpull. If you’re not going to screw everyone, you don’t go to the store and buy a gallon of baby oil.
I’ve turned into the person who doesn’t really care about new shit until it’s been around a decade, has no CLAs, and is under a standard GPL/AGPL license (none of this source-available business license nonsense), and has a proven track record of the developers not being shitheads.
This how people end up on the foss purist path… Been hurt too many times for be trusting any bros again.
