It’s a story from April, I tried seeing if it was posted before, however it’s the story about how the advertising and finance team beat the search team into submission by ousting the core person protecting it to pursue “growth” and “revenue” at all costs.
I started finding DDG’s results just as bad as Google’s, so I switched to SearXNG and have been pretty happy with it so far.
Its open source so anyone can run an instance if they wish. I feel like this sort of model is much more resistant to enshitification.
I run a SearXNG instance myself and while it is a fine aggregator, it’s important to note what it is and isn’t. For instance, Sear does not have a dedicated search index and leans on third party API calls (to indexes such as the aforementioned Google and DDG listings.) This is my understanding, feel free to correct it.
For my money, I like the anonymity that Sear can afford and that it hides the AI bullshit pouring into the UIs. My son and I were talking over the weekend about how unreliable he is finding the move to AI search.
Edit: A list of public SearXNG instances for anyone that doesn’t want to spin up their own.
Yes you’re absolutely right. The problem of aggregators is that if all the aggregated searches go to shit, then so does it. Garbage in, garbage out.
SearXNG is just a meta search engine. It uses Google and DDG under the hood, among others. How is it possible that it’s better?
Because the aggregated weighted result ranking provides a more useful page rank than any individual search engine, and if any search engine tries to (accidentally or otherwise) stuff specific results into the top ranks, it doesn’t matter. It’ll be deranked because no other engine displays those results highly. In a similar manner, it deranks targeted SEO attempts unless multiple platforms are targeted.
Don’t get me wrong, it still has its problems. For example, if the individual search engines all get a bit too samey, then it will as well.