this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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I use Duckduckgo, but I realised these big(ish) search engines give me all the commercialised results. Duckduckgo has been going down the slope for years, but not at such a rate as Google or Bing has.

I want to have a search engine that gives me all the small blogs and personal sites.

Does something like this exist?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You can't just index mastodon, they'll kill you!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Im a grown up, I have self preservation instincts. Only indexing opt in accounts and only for limited time so the angry mob won’t burn me.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

I'm building my own. Keep you posted.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Try this engine

https://search.marginalia.nu/

Or a SearXNG instance

https://search.disroot.org/search

You may also be interested in the Indie Web movement. This site is a great resource for it, with yet more links to indie sites and blogs.

Finally, not quite what you asked but here's a freebie, in case you didn't know about it:

https://wiby.me/

It's an old web search engine. It only indexes pages from the 00s and earlier.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Ah Marginalia is absolutely awesome! I feel like modern search is almost an extension of website names now, so if I want to find netflix but don't know it's website, I might search for "netflix". Marginalia is actually a cool way to find new stuff- like you can search "bike maintenance" and find cool blog posts about that topic.

I honestly can't remember if that's something google and the like used to do, but doesn't now, or if they never did. Either way, I love it!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

This is how Google started out, until like 2010-2015 it was wonderful. I think it's just losing the seo slop arms race now tbh

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Aside from SearXNG, I didn't know about these search engines until your recommendation. Thanks to Wiby and Marginalia, I found old rich content (old BBS list conversations, for example) that I was looking for, regarding studies on the occult and esotericism. Thank you so much!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The more obscure a web page is, the more likely it is to be indexed only by the large search engines (i.e. Google). There are search queries that return 0 results on DDG, but quite a few (relatively) obscure websites on Google. This is simply because the more money a search engine operator has, the more websites it will index.

So what you want is kind of contradictory.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Although Google indeed is the greatest indexer of the World Wide Web, unfortunately, the SEO and the AI makes it so hard to find something, for example, from before 2000s, such as BBS List archives, old blogosphere and personal webpages from that time, simply because they had no modern SEO nor AI keywords at that time. These old content are entirely free from AI-generated slop, (almost) free from dis- and mis-informations (because, at the time of BBS and Gopher, the Internet was still being born, and books were the main source of knowledge), so old content is sine qua non for one that's seeking real knowledge.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

(almost) free from dis- and mis-informations (because, at the time of BBS and Gopher, the Internet was still being born

Yeah, no. There was tons of bullshit. I ran across a post back then saying you could get psychic powers by eating the Americium sensor in your fire detector.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Yeah, almost free. Nowadays there are LLMs (~~Google's Gemini~~ ahem) recommending people "to eat their daily rocks to be healthy". Now I see exactly where the AI got these absurdity from. lol

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If you want blogs, I recommend you use gemini: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

Download Lagrange and begin browsing. It's basically a small-web of personal blogs.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

it's of course great! But not really an alternative to the current web search engine.. Do you have a search engine for Gemini?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

gemini://kennedy.gemi.dev/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Thank you sir.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Google are the ones who have really gone down the toilet in recent years. They ditched cached pages, soured search results with paid ads and even their image search is as bad as Tineye for reverse image searching these days. Literally the only thing Alphabet really have going for them anymore is Android and YouTube.

It's baffling that a company which was once so dominant in the web search space that their name was literally used as a verb for looking things up for decades have now enshittified their flagship product so much that they're making rivals like Bing, Lycos, Duckduckgo, etc look like viable alternatives.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

Every company is going down the drain just at different speeds.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago

Offtopic but ddg is a bing frontend so they should share the same results.

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