I’ve gotten very into self-hosting (on device, not on a server) my own search engine, but searxng is unbearably clunky to make run on my Gentoo OpenRC machine. Two projects stuck out, 4get and omnisearch, but which of these do you think is the best and do you know other ones?

  • Buage_@piefed.socialEnglish
    11·
    23 hours ago

    Kagi’s on top ! It’s a few bucks per month, but search results are amazing, it surface small websites and block slop.

    It even allows you to block useless websites like pinterest

        • willington@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          1·
          17 hours ago

          I don’t have the answer to your qustion, but I like to occasionally consider that there is no such thing as a stupid action, only an action that I don’t understand.

          Why would someone talk like that?

          Some possibilities:

          1. To stem all future criticism of Kagi by making the first and the most at the time visible criticism sound braindead. Thus creating an association that all of criticism is braindead.
          2. To use the reverse psychology to promote Kagi. You say it sucks, and you don’t think it’s worth your time to even explain it? Well, I am a rebel, so as a fuck you, I will use Kagi.
          3. To further lock in the attention and the mental resources on Kagi. Love it or hate it, be indifferent to it, but here we are thinking about Kagi. Kagi’s profile has been raised.

          These three immediately jump at me, because I see people preaching Kagi in a manner of an influence op.

          So these negs could be part of the op.

          Again. Not saying I know. I don’t. And I likely won’t use Kagi myself. It’s just fun to speculate a bit.

        • FoundFootFootage78@lemmy.mlEnglish
          3·
          11 hours ago

          Price is a big one. That aside I didn’t like the interface, I couldn’t consistently find the results I was looking for, and again price.

          I’d maybe be willing to pay $5 a month for a good search engine. $10 a month even. But $10 a month knowing half my money is paying for bundled AI searches I never wanted nor asked for is a bridge to far. I’m not militantly anti-AI, but I don’t want to be forced to pay for it if I want Kagi to be even remotely useful (300 searches is a joke).

          • yuki_gassen@lemmy.ml
            1·
            2 hours ago

            300 is low, i agree. but idk, if it’s a free product, then YOU are the product. is my data still being used in ways that profit a few and invade my privacy? probably, but less than google i hope.

            I am on the anti-AI side of things, by nature of being human. and yeah, there’s some AI shit in kagi, as with seemingly all others. but it at least it’s opt-in (i think). i’ve never seen it shoved in my face, which i can’t say for example duckduckgo.

            can’t tell u what price is best for you, or what UI u prefer. but trash? no. google is trash.

  • SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zone
    10·
    23 hours ago

    None of those - searxng, deGoog, 4get - are private search engines. The are metacrawlers / indexers for things like Google, brave, DuckDuckGo, etc etc.

    The difference is not subtle.

    They anonymise your request to the underlying index, but the index they’re querying is still Google/Brave/DDG etc…so you can still be fingerprinted over time.

    If you want a private search engine, the only one that comes to mind in YaCy (which is peer2peer).

    If you don’t want to self host or p2p, your options are Mojeek (own crawler, index, no tracking), Marginalia (ditto but very niche) and maybe Kagi (which is sort of hybrid).