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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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[-] 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

[-] 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)

[-] 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.