I’ve used DuckduckGo for at least a decade. When they started embedding their little AI summary thing at the top of the chat I knew it was coming. But recently, it seems when I search anything I get tons of the same slop, SEO pumped, AI generated info pages. There was a time when I would at least stumble upon an old HTML article from a university or something. Everything sucks now. Do they even make encyclopedia books anymore?
heard SearxNG is good but you have to host it yourself
You don’t have to host it yourself, there are plenty of public instances.
SearxNG has lots of free hosts online, there is a list of them at https://searx.space/ . I’ve had pretty good experiences with it, it has less slop, but it can also miss things.
Jynx, you owe me a beer!
The thing about searxng is that it’s essentially a search engine aggregator, so it will only ever be as good as the regular search engines it’s pulling results from. Like searx isn’t doing its own searches and giving you better results than google, ddg, etc., it’s outsourcing your search to those other search engines and showing you a compilation of their results without you having to interact with them. Of course you can fine tune how it does that and choose which actual search engines it gives you results from, but it’s still ultimately search results from those primary engines. So its major benefit is privacy and all the good stuff that comes from that like no ads and not getting tracked. But if the only things that turn up on google, ddg, bing, etc., Are slop, then that’s all you’re going to get with searx as well. That said, I still highly recommend it, it’s the only thing I use for searching these days.
Yeah no magic bullets as indexing the web is expensive and increasingly stuff is in walled gardens because everyone wants monopoly.