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This Guy Has Built an Open Source Search Engine as an Alternative to Google in His Spare Time (www.404media.co)

submitted 9 months ago by noodlejetski@lemm.ee to c/foss@beehaw.org

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"I found it very weird that there essentially is no way to browse the web in an open manner. So that's what I am trying to build," the founder of Stract said.

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[-] luciole@beehaw.org 29 points 9 months ago

For anyone wondering about how they'll eventually address financial sustainability if Stract takes off:

Stract is currently not monetized in any way, but its website says it will eventually have contextual ads tied to specific search terms but that it will not track its users, which is similar to the system DuckDuckGo uses. Stract also plans on offering ad-free searches to paying subscribers.

I'd pay for independent, non meta, ad-free search. I bet a more straightforward approach is more energy efficient as well. In the meanwhile the big tech are running a gazillion processes on our data to suck every bit of wealth they can out of our existence through their free (in it's littlest sense) products.

[-] Corgana@startrek.website 21 points 9 months ago

I’d pay for independent, non meta, ad-free search.

You might, but not enough people would to make it sustainable. Neeva was really well loved but couldn't make the math work.

[-] elvith@feddit.de 9 points 9 months ago

I'd pay for independent, non meta, ad-free search.

Haven't tested it yet, but have seen it mentioned several times here on Lemmy:

https://kagi.com/

[-] luciole@beehaw.org 16 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Kagi is a meta search engine though. They just do calls to Google, Yandex, Brave, etc. cut the ad rot and sprinkle some secret spice on top.

EDIT: source, https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html

[-] melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Interestingly the source you linked says that they do have an in-house web index, they just use it alongside other sources rather than using it as their only source

[-] debanqued@beehaw.org 1 points 9 months ago

#DuckDuckGo makes the same claim as well. IMO it’s a great marketing tactic to say “we have our own crawler” to imply to people they will get some unique results-- but I’m not convinced that supplemental crawlers are significant. They are all too happy to rely on the crutch of the search engines they source from.

[-] elvith@feddit.de 1 points 9 months ago

Hmmmm I didn't know that, every comment that I read, didn't mention this fact. I'm running my own Searxng instance and Meta engines can be quite powerful, especially when you can adjust them a bit and filter out what you consider "spam" results (e.g. pinterest)