Always has been. Chk chk

As I stated here https://ttrpg.network/comment/7065350

It seems search engines supposedly using their own data, or acting as FE for Google, are down, too

*wrapper

"independent"

Isn’t that searx / searxng?

SearXNG is a fork from the well-known searx metasearch engine which was inspired by the Seeks project. It provides basic privacy by mixing your queries with searches on other platforms without storing search data. SearXNG can be added to your browser’s search bar; moreover, it can be set as the default search engine.

SearXNG appreciates your concern regarding logs, so take the code from the SearXNG sources and run it yourself!

Add your instance to this list of public instances to help other people reclaim their privacy and make the internet freer. The more decentralized the internet is, the more freedom we have!

Smth like yaCy?

https://yacy.net/

I was thinking about this and imagined the federated servers handling the index db, search algorithms, and search requests, but instead leverage each users browser/compute to do the actual web crawling/scraping/indexing; the server simply performing CRUD operations on the processed data from clients to index db. This approach would target the core reason why search engines fail (cost of scraping and processing billions of sites), reduce the costs to host a search server, and spread the expense across the user base.

It also may have the added benefit of hindering surveillance capitalism due to a sea of junk queries from every client, especially if it were making crawler requests from the same browser (obviously needs to be isolated from the users own data, extensions, queries, etc). The federated servers would also probably need to operate as lighthouses that orchestrate the domains and IP ranges to crawl, and efficiently distribute the workload to client machines.

I've also thought about this, but I don't know what would be the costs to do such a thing. (I'm ignorant on the subject)

I've been using Kagi, and although it has a pricetag, and not quite as good as Google, I am happy with it and has worked well for me.

Well isn't that great, mr. moneybags

/S

Yes I'm making a stupid joke bc it's a paid search engine, something i never would have imagined would be a thing. Now I'm going to price it and perhaps finally pull the trigger on an acct there because fuck google, fuck bing, and fuck all these sites being "wrappers" of them. I come from the dial-up days when lycos, webcrawler, altavista, yahoo--hard searches that would separate the men from the boys. Now we just get this "A.I." bullshit instead and it falls apart under its own weight. Excuse me while i wave my cane at the sun ☀️

Edit: so it turns out you can get 100 free searches on their site here: https://kagi.com/onboarding?p=choose_plan

Otherwise, it's $5/month for 300 searches, $10/mo for unlimited, and $25/mo for their "ultimate" exclusive experience...whatever that may be. I'm gonna try the freebies and see what happens. I'm still on the fence about paying for search, but I'm really tired of bs coming from these companies leading to things like we're experiencing today

I hope Apple will finally allow custom search engines because the current workaround when wanting to use Kagi as default in iOS Safari is a shitty user experience (and I'm not blaming Kagi for that)

"We're totally not just rewrapping Bing results!!!"

Yet, DuckDuckGo and Startpage seem down, too. ~~Even though DDG supposedly uses its own results, and SP supposedly is a FE for Google~~ DDG uses Bing results and SP aggregates Google and Bing results

https://downdetector.com/status/bing/