I’m one of those guys. Searx itself is just a meta search engine, using Google and many other search engines. You don’t need to dive into any rabbit hole, just use a pre existing server for easy access. From time to time I switch the instance. You can then still decide if you want go the full rabbit hole and host it yourself, but that is not a requirement. At least its fully open source and your data/search queries are not sent to Google or Microsoft. In the settings can be specified which engines you want to use:
Try it out here: searx.space and for some information about SearxNG: docs.searxng.org
hedge@beehaw.org 5 months ago
brie@beehaw.org 5 months ago
Alexandria and Stract use their own open source crawlers. Brave is also independent, if I recall correctly.
Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
Brave does have an option to use anonymous Google results as a fallback if their index doesn’t return enough results, but it will ask you before it does it.
Mojeek@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
This is correct, we are independent and have been since all the way back in 2004, 8bn-page index and growing 😀
Danterious@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
I just read your profile and can’t believe you guys have been on lemmy for 3 years. What made you guys join before lemmy got popular?
~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~
Mojeek@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
people interested in alternative search tend to be in spaces that aren’t your GAFAM big tech networks, we’ve been on masto since 2018 also
not to come off as overly dismissive of people elsewhere, but you also find that the quality of discourse and people’s willingness to think about things are both considerably more elevated
readbeanicecream@kbin.earth 5 months ago
Nice! Mojeek looks great. Thanks for the tip!
doxxx@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Kagi.com has its own I believe. But you have to pay a subscription to use it.
Mindless_Enigma@beehaw.org 5 months ago
My understanding is that Kagi relies on the likes of Bing and Google but since it uses more than one of them it can keep functioning if one goes down.
doxxx@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
TIL. I thought they had their own crawler. I’m a little disappointed.