Your guide to switching Search Engines and supporting smaller and more ethical companies!
cross-posted from: https://europe.pub/post/55363
Shoutout to u/theFallenWalnut on Reddit
Interested in a far-out-there project, that is still very early, lacking in manpower and money, may never pan out, but has some very interesting ideas and vision?
Check out mwmbl - a project aiming to become a truly FOSS search engine, with Wikipedia-like volunteer curating of results/training of the search algorithm, as well as volunteer scraping of the web, to build it up.
If you want to participate, their non-experimental, older and more barebones interface is easier for that:
I currently use it as my go-to "first search" engine, and if I can, I help curate the search results, and then switch to Ecosia for a second search if they were useless. That already helps in slowly training the algorithm, as well as changes the results in the index real time.
You can also support the web crawling and index building efforts with either a Firefox extension, or a CLI script.. Not to brag or anything, but letting the latter run on my server has netted them a pretty hefty increase in crawled addresses, without slowing things down here on my Fediverse servers too much.
THIS IS NOT A SUITABLE DROP-IN REPLACEMENT FOR ANYTHING YET. But if you love the idea, go ahead and check it out.
That mwmble has shockingly bad results though. Every test search I just gave returned completely unrelated results on the top page even for pretty commonly discussed topics
Yeah, I gave it a try and gotta admit, I really wasn't sure what I was looking at when the results came back.
Reminds me of old 90's search engines before Google (the good one, before it went evil) reinvented how a search engine should return results.
I'll keep with them for a while as I believe in their goal (I installed the addon... not sure what it does...) but it's a tough sell to anyone else at the moment...
Didn't Brendan Eich, the CEO of Brave, recently come out in support of Trump or some bullshit like that? I can't remember what it was, but it was a huge red flag.
I mean, he already had donated thousands to anti-LGBT groups for years.
Edit -
This is what I was thinking of:
https://lemmy.world/post/24930257
There is a "TO NOTE" section in the info graphic. It's literally in there.
Now off... $fscking myself.
Oh, that's nice. I guess... That must have been cut off when I originally saw the image. The issue with stuffing that information in the corner makes it less likely for someone to actually parse that information along with the main part of the infographic. Especially considering it's right next to where they gave a footnote to another company, but not for Brave. That's rather inconsistent and makes it even more disconnected from the main part.
I'd prefer if Brave itself was stuffed into the corner along with the note.
Duckduckgo and Startpage aren’t in “advert free tier”, yet they arguably have it even better. You can opt out of adds with them for free and without a hassle. It’s in the settings.
So that’s arguably far better.
Everything is ad-free tier when you use adblockers.
This infograph should probably also include that Kagi uses the Russian search index Yandex also. It basically says that Kagi is the best search engine and that it fits all the requirements, but puts Brave in a bad light due to their CEO. If ethics are to be included, I believe Kagis use of Yandex should also be included.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1gvcqua/psa_the_kagi_search_engine_directly_funds_yandex/
Idk, to me Kagi stood out by being US-based, non-environmental and for profit. It's just true that it fills all the boxes
Good point
I think it's important to note that Kagi uses Yandex, besides others, as a provider and pays them for it. Yandex is Russian owned. Might not be a deciding factor for everyone, but I personally think we shouldn't pay money towards Russia. And the US for that matter...
This has been brought up multiple times and the Kagi CEO(?), Vlad, said this won't change and Kagi doesn't care about geopolitical stuff and just wants to offer the best search engine. Which is fair, but I think not supporting a tyrannical, war hungry government is important.
It's more "smallweb" oriented, but there's also Marginalia Search, independent index, operated out of Sweden, no ads, and warns about sites that use JS and include trackers.
Ah yes, Brave, one known for its promotion of cryptocurrency is “ethical”
@FallenWalnut@lemmy.world is also on !PurchaseWithPurpose@lemmy.world but that community doesn't seem active
Where does SearXNG fit in?
It doesn't exactly. It's like Lemmy, where it's self hosted/someone is hosting it. So it depends entirely on which instance you use and who is hosting it and how much you trust them/what their values are.
Most though would fit into the right in the same area as SWISSCOWS.
Sad to see that Ecosia and Qwant don't seem to work without Javascript. I'll stick with DDG, and may consider using Mojeek more in the future. The fact that DDG doesn't have its own index does bother me a bit.
Sad to see that Ecosia and Qwant don’t seem to work without Javascript. I’ll stick with DDG,
The difference that JS seems to make for DDG when I search with and without is pretty large. I get completely different sets of results, and the non JS side is often much, much less relevant.
just signed up for Kagi, well see if its good enough for me to pay for it
best feature so far is I can block Amazon from my searches without needing to type that specifically every tjme
Thx walnut.
don't care about the JScript, I really enjoy using qwant daily
I've been using webcrawler
On Linux most package managers download an index of every package, its requirements and installation instructions. This means I can search through it however I want.
How open would you guys be to scraping and compiling "search engine"-esq indicies on your local machines?