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Any “small-web” search engines? (lemmy.zip)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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I use Duckduckgo, but I realised these big(ish) search engines give me all the commercialised results. Duckduckgo has been going down the slope for years, but not at such a rate as Google or Bing has.

I want to have a search engine that gives me all the small blogs and personal sites.

Does something like this exist?

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[–] 22 points 2 years ago (1 child)

You're looking for Kagi.com

Not only does it give better search results quality wise on "the big web" - you can select to search specific parts, like blogs.

Best part - it's completely ad and spam free. You pay for it with actual money instead of with your data.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    Why not run an SearXNG instance and help everyone instead? Y'know, Kagi is pretty expensive and they are also getting into AI shit.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I'm hoping just as Proton do good free stuff using money I pay them (Visionary account) Kagi does/will do the same. The Internet as a whole needs to stop being ad-supported.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    I refuse to believe Proton when they do advertisements lol. They also are being pretty suspicious with ignoring XMR support since years of people requesting it. If they ever even considered it a bit, their new shit Proton Wallet wouldn't allow you to store (or only store) bitcoin, which we all know has nothing that protects your privacy.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Monero support is a massive red flag for criminal activity, even by the very low standards of crypto.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    No. It's for privacy. If they don't support anonymous payments, there's literally no reason to host a .onion site just to fool people. I'd say that's a big red flag from a "privacy respecting" company.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    There are pros/cons to anonymous payments. It's a bit sophomoric to claim privacy is impossible without anonymous payments.

    There are most definitely many use cases for .onion sites without any sort of payments ("anonymous" or otherwise).

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    The Internet as a whole needs to stop being ad-supported.

    I'm with you to an extent but it also makes me consider what my online experience would have been if I needed money to do anything online. The internet was a huge part of my childhood and I definitely didn't have money to spend on it.

    We barely had enough to get internet when I was ~10yrs old and it was much later when we got something better than dial up.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    There will always be those who offer things for free, always has been. Granted, we might've gotten used to higher quality (paid for by ads) and will need to "settle" for lower quality if we don't pay with money - but I think for humanity's sake this is something that needs to be done.

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  • [+] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)
    [removed by mod]
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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    5 euros a month for 300 searches. Definitely not worth it. I live in germany.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Can you expand on how running your own SearXNG helps others? Does it contribute to some shared index or something?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    SearXNG is a meta search engine, which means it gets the search results from other search engines (Google, Bing, Qwant, etc.) and show them to you. It acts a proxy, thus hiding the users IP. This means Google can't target ads based on your IP and also can't make a profile about you.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    What IP is Google getting if I self host the instance?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

    The instance's IP

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Right. So, my IP. Which is the same (IP-wise) as if I'd just searched Google directly, leaving aside the benefits of searching other engines simultaneously.

    I've also seen people suggest we should open our self-hosted SearXNG instances to others and let random people submit searches to it thereby causing searches to appear to come from my home IP address. That strikes me as a terrible idea given what some people search on the web. I have also never run a TOR exit node.

    I use Kagi myself and I was hooked after using their free trial so I'm comparing to that.

    When I submit a search to Kagi, Google (and their other downstream search engines) gets the search from Kagi. Yes, that means I have to trust Kagi to some extent but as we can see, there are obvious problems with SearXNG whether using it myself or opening it to others.

    The AI features are mentioned further up the thread as a negative but I disagree. I recently cancelled my subscription to ChatGPT ($20/mo) and upgraded my Kagi subscription ($25/mo) which gives me searching and access to all the most popular LLMs which I do use from time to time, mostly for code help. Personally, it's a great value.

    I didn't even know about the AI features when I started paying for it. That "side" of Kagi is fully optional and very unobtrusive.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    That strikes me as a terrible idea given what some people search on the web. I have also never run a TOR exit node.

    It is somewhat like a TOR exit node indeed. Though you can easily prove your innocence by saying that you did not make these searches but that you merely run a meta search engine that helps others protect their privacy. Even the TOR project has templates for exit nodes to submit them to the government or whoever is contacting them in those cases.

    https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/tor-abuse-templates/

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