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:
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
Alternative you may consider is the brave search. Supports many bangs (?all of what ddg supports). It is independent of other search engines as well. But its picture search is poor.
people interested in alternative search tend to be in spaces that aren’t your GAFAM big tech networks, we’ve been on masto since 2018 also
not to come off as overly dismissive of people elsewhere, but you also find that the quality of discourse and people’s willingness to think about things are both considerably more elevated
Brave does have an option to use anonymous Google results as a fallback if their index doesn’t return enough results, but it will ask you before it does it.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@beehaw.org
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
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…
Doesn’t searx just aggregate google and bing for you?
Google, Bing, and a plethora of others.
You can turn off Google if you want and use whatever engines you like.
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!retroto 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!retroThat combination works in Brave to search the forum (prefixing !ddg or !d) I’m surprised it doesn’t in Searx.
I’ve just tested this in Brave and it works. And it does not require the combination,
!retroon its own is enough. Nice!Alternative you may consider is the brave search. Supports many bangs (?all of what ddg supports). It is independent of other search engines as well. But its picture search is poor.
I’ve switched to this from DuckDuckGo right during the downtime and, so far, it’s been working out great.
Thank you.
Literally did this this morning and now searx is the default search engine on all my devices. Works great so far
Seems like most search engines these days are primarily Google-based or Bing-based. Mojeek has its own crawler, I think…
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?
Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
people interested in alternative search tend to be in spaces that aren’t your GAFAM big tech networks, we’ve been on masto since 2018 also
not to come off as overly dismissive of people elsewhere, but you also find that the quality of discourse and people’s willingness to think about things are both considerably more elevated
Nice! Mojeek looks great. Thanks for the tip!
Alexandria and Stract use their own open source crawlers. Brave is also independent, if I recall correctly.
Brave does have an option to use anonymous Google results as a fallback if their index doesn’t return enough results, but it will ask you before it does it.
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.
TIL. I thought they had their own crawler. I’m a little disappointed.
They do both, their own index focuses on the “small web”, more info here:
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html