It is becoming near impossible to find relevant information from search engines. Duckduckgo, SearXNG, Bing, Google, and so many more mainstream engines have a significantly high noise to signal ratio, and it is getting worse.
Here are a collection of the best search engines I know, please add more to the list.
- Forum Search Engine: https://crowdview.ai/
- Non-commercial Search: https://search.marginalia.nu/
- Libre Meta Search Engine: https://librey.devol.it/
- Golden Age Search Engine: https://www.wiby.org/
- Yandex: https://yandex.com/
If no more high quality search engines exist, would it be possible to host your own?
EDIT: Some new discoveries. The addon uBlacklist and filters can block super SEO sites from appearing in search.
Why would they do all that work to create a better search engine than Google and give it away for free? What is going to pay their bills?
Google pays their bills by selling your data and spying on your searches, not to mention they are morally corrupt. Kagi pays their bills with your monthly sub. Seems a lot better.
I’m worried eventually even Kagi will get enshittified. It has been a common trend that almost always occurs. Open source is the only way to ensure stability. Conflict of interest is what leads to companies either overcharging, or even accepting to get bought out.
Don’t get me wrong, Kagi seems to be a great company thus far! But for something as important as search it would be best to have an open source solution.
Probably they will, but it could take a long time. Valve is still good as an example of a company that managed to not become crap.
Open source is the only way to provide stability? Can you explain more about this?
Valve is great! Private and non-profit organizations give me some hope for a better internet one day.
Regarding Kagi, there are other potential concerns with privacy, data leaks and price gouging as well. The Patriot Act and Snowden’s leaks have shown that companies will lie in their privacy policy to appeal to authorities even if they claim they are not storing information. All your health related searches, sensitive personal details, private life, etc is also always linked to your payment method waiting for a potential data leak if they are lying. (Or a copy is just sent to five eyes)
All that is to say, be wary of trusting your privacy to companies. Monetization is a powerful motivator!
You can pay with bitcoin, which might help keeping the account entirely anonymous for some.
After that power company got blackmailed in the American South and extorted for like 40000 Bitcoin, which they paid…but then within 24 hours the FBI had recovered all of it…which is something no one was supposed to be capable of doing, I’m going to go ahead and say Bitcoin anonymity is compromised.
That means the FBI or DHS has devoted the computational power necessary to track every.single.bitcoin.transaction and then indexed it all well enough to cross reference against metadata.
Bitcoin is as secure as they allow it to be. It’s most likely allowed for the same reason the Tor network is, because it’s an avenue to move resources or information to undercover assets overseas.
At this point, I’ve come to expect that all of the products I like are going to be ruined at some point, so it’s about establishing enough independence to more easily transition to the next service.
Kagi’s great, and I’ll worry about finding a better search engine once it gets worse, but I don’t expect that to happen before my next renewal, so I’m happy.
Self hosting is smart! Usually good things always come to an end, at least if they are not open sourced.
Plus self hosting an index big enough and fast enough for a useful search engine is ridiculous.