Another useful feature for power users that Google is killing.
They don’t care about us that day they we have a problem and the solution is in a now defunct site. That doesn’t generate revenue. “When People search on Google they need to find what they need on a click on the ads”, the shareholders are saying
What is the alternative if we need a searchable index of the internet? Self host? Participate in a community driven swarm? Is that possible or even feasible for us to do? I’d love to see such a thing. It would be quite interesting to learn about the architecture of it, especially ways that the tech prevents gaming the search results, but I have yet to see something like that.
Or are you suggesting that internet search should be done by a non-profit or government agency that we fund with tax dollars? Even the internet archive struggles to stay alive.
Edit: yay, no answers (ie: no alternatives to a for-profit company driven search engine), just angry downvotes, haha
If you figure out how to search “correctly” on SearXNG instances, some of them are pretty good (though they source part of their results from google). That’s how I search most of the time nowadays. I’ve found a favourite instance and a few backups. My most important advice is: to change the default language from “auto” to “en”, and only change it to some other locale for results specifically in that language/country.
If I understand correctly, isn’t that just a meta search that is using corporate results as the back end?
It is indeed, but in my experience it’s somehow better than the corporate backends at presenting the “correct” results to me.
this has been my experience with paulgo.io with the exception of images, which i sometimes have to use google for