A look at search engines with their own indexes
A cursory review of all the non-metasearch, indexing search engines I have been able to find.
It should mention that Qwant (France) and Ecosia (Germany), announced last year a joint project for an independent European search index, although only for French and German according to this publication. https://betterweb.qwant.com/en/2024/11/08/ecosia-and-qwant-join-forces-to-develop-european-search-index/
Looks like for the hardware requirements for self hosting some of the open source options, I'll be saving up quite a bit for SSDs.
FWIW, I gave YaCy a try a while back, and I agree with the article on that one. Shit tier results that make ancient AltaVista look good. Might be fine for intranet search. I like the idea of its distributed hosting, but pass on this one.
Other poster mentioned SearXNG, and while I haven't delved into that too much, it's probably worth a check. Pass on YaCy.
SearXNG is a meta search entirely reliant on other services.
I really like Yacy's results, personally. It seems good for the kinds of sites I care about. My biggest problem with it is that the newest version is so memory-hungry.
That was a good read, well done! I'd be interested if you ever reconsider Startpage. I've had good success with that on my work computer.
Great article, appreciate that I'm not the only one concerned around some of the ethical choices Kagi has been making.
I got a sub to Kagi a few months ago. It seems pretty good but I'm behind on the news. I've read a few things here and there, but can you explain a bit about the ethics?
Last I saw they still paid Yandex for access to that index (weigh how important that is yourself), they also pushed back on suicide warnings if you ask Kagi how to kill yourself, and I learned from this article that they may be using additional data sources that contain higher levels of homophobic sentiment.
Basically, the company's tagline is "Humanize the Web", but I don't think their actions thus far show we agree on what Humanize means.
Same. I use Kagi because search is an essential function of my job and I can’t extract decent results from Google anymore, but if there were another engine with equally good results and a better ethical track record I’d switch.
(There isn’t. I’ve tried Qwant, Ecosia, DuckDuckGo and a handful of others. Was not impressed.)
I share the sentiment. For me the results are acceptable, and being able to custom rank sites in results is very useful, but the killer feature is not having ads or forcing AI down my throat.
Great list! I've been wanting to start using a smaller search engine with its own index, just for the sake of making sure there's an alternative to GBY. (Also, there's a new and useful acronym, haha.) Mojeek was the only one I was aware of before today.
BTW, exalead.com doesn't seem to be a search engine anymore. I recognized that one because I remember discovering it a while ago...in 2007, maybe? But it looks like it's not available as a regular search engine now.
edit: Also, this is the first really useful page I've read via the Gemini protocol, so thanks for that!
The plural of index is indices.
indexes is valid: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/index
The article addresses that in a footnote
