Now that Google is slowly but surely going to shits, i’m searching for a new search engine, and i was thinking, of going the extra mile and hosting my own, decentralized one, but which one should i choose (YACY, Presearch or Seeks), or are all of them not there yet?

  • SmokeyDope@lemmy.world
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    14 hours ago

    I wrote a guide on here about the differences between alternative search engines. I recommend for you either YaCy or marginalia.nu. searxng supports calling YaCy (I actually contributed to that feature on the github).

    The problem with decentralized engines like marginalia and YaCy is that they aren’t good at the things a average user wants from a typical search engine. Ideally a search engine is meant to quickly provide you links to webpages which are strongly related in content to you are looking for. Shopping, weather, map directions, local business hours. On some level you need to prioritize showing the user what they want ideally within the first few results.

    Decentralized engines by their nature don’t do this easily. Instead using YaCy or marginalia feels like a scavenger hunt where you get handed a page of random websites loosely connected by your keyword search term and are told to start looking. This is good when your in the mood for blogspam and personal webpage blog dicovery, but not great for finding local buisniess info quickly. YaCy has a user curated priority system but not enough user mass adoption to be worth a damn in practice.

    So sadly if you want anything resembling google or bing results for your practical convinence driven daily internet searching needs, you need to scrape them with searxng or use one of their few real search engine company competitors funding their own indexers and web crawlers. So really your options are scraping google, bing, mojeek, qwant, kagi and DuckDuckGo(ish they still use bing for indexing a lot).

    Out of those Ive actually warmed up to Kagi over the year. I was put off at the idea of subscription based internet search but its a really good service they provide and they line out their reasoning for pricing well. They seem to be using that monthly sub money to actually improve the service and user experiences while remaining transparent with constant changelogs and blog updates. Kagis recent implimentation of privacy pass protocol, available TOR access, anonymous payment options, and taking fediverse + small net indexing seriously are all green flags to me. Never thought I would pay for a search engine but the way the world is going I’d rather eat the equivalent of a 5-10$ patreon sub to grow a service I believe is respecting me as a customer over fucking FAANG treating me like cattle and absolutely violating user experience so hard just for another nickles worth value in data scraping.

    • 10001110101@lemm.ee
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      14 hours ago

      Yeah, I’ve been experimenting with YaCy, and discovered they have a PageRank-like algorithm, but it uses a lot of resources, so they don’t recommend using it and it’s turned off by default. Haven’t tried turning it on myself. Looks like the maintainer is focusing on YaCy Grid, meant for organizations, not general decentralized search.