this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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Im noticing its harder and harder to find things on google. Searching for a companies quarterly profits, cost of medical care for all per capita, and othet economic details are all getting more and more buried in google. Just asking how other contries do their social programs results in us based opionion articles....like wtf are we even doing.

I understand scrolling and indexing sites is an enormous undertaking. Is there currently a federated open source search engine? If not is their a potential to create one?

Is there a trustworthy private option?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 minutes ago

Maybe Stract?

It's open source and has its own search index.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 hours ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Seems to be using searXNG. Routes the search query to different instances

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

yes, lot of folks dont know where to start with searxng so this is nice and simple and just works

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 hours ago

Awsome thank you!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

wow, thanks for sharing, that's awesome

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

This is actually super cool.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 hours ago

I gotta shout out trom when I can, they're doing great work

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (2 children)

There is SearXNG, it's open source and decentralized but AFAIK the different instances don't really share information between them. I'm personally interested in trying it, but I'm apprehensive about the fact that it's really hard to know whether a particular instance is trustworthy, and while it's possible I don't think it makes much sense to host it myself.

https://searx.space/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

I'll add that it's a meta-search engine rather than something that does the actual searching itself. That's still useful, but you're limited by the quality of the upstream search engines (including google, duckduckgo, qwant, etc).

The gain from self-hosting is that you have more control over the results, and can do things like redirect social media sites to privacy friendly alternatives, and create your own bangs (or even add your own custom search engines).

Probably not a massive privacy gain though, although if you host the instance behind a privacy VPN queries won't be associated with your IP at least.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

There is yacy
It's not the most accurate but you can help by adding a server or client to the mix.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

I've taken a couple of shots at yacy, but have little luck. It's possible to self host a searxng in docker that uses almost no resources. I use a server, but a buddy literally has it load on startup in his Windows.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

Ill give this a shot! Thanks for the recommendation!