actually awesome and fast search engine (depending on which instance you use) with no trashy AI and ADs results also great for privacy, if you don’t know which instance to use go to https://searx.space/ and choose an instance closest to you
I mean it’s often better than nothing, but it is a meta search that still often uses Google or Bing to gather results. IMHO, cut off the need for that data on the whole and use an option like Mojeek
For all their talk of doing things different with their own index and rankings. Mojeek is following exactly what Google did. It’s still an ad based business model that makes users into products to be sold to advertisers. They’re good now, while still trying to build market share. But once their investors get hungry, the enshitification will commence.
we make money mainly from our api, our investors are patient private capital and we don’t take vc, appreciate your point but these are fundamentally different situations, our ads (when they run) will also be contextual so more of a ddg situation than a “makes users into products to be sold to advertisers”
fair enough if it’s not for you though
I don’t know if the comparison is inaccurate.
You make money from advertising to your users (“ddg situation” notwithstanding), are beholden to your investors (private status notwithstanding) and need to see more users to increase revenue. The person above you is saying that this model is what will drive you to eventually be as bad as Google. Do you understand?
We make money from our API, what they’re referencing is a beta ads programme which was running
Do you have topics that are censored? I searched for my reddit post “what I’ve learnt from the mantis aliens”, and it does not show up in your results. Neither at google’s. But it does on other search engines. The ufo/alien stuff are censored in most search engines, while there isn’t a reason to be. That is how I judge search engines. And Mojeek doesn’t give me the results I asked for.
Reddit doesn’t allow us to crawl: https://www.reddit.com/robots.txt
API index access is an important difference.
If it was only that, without public facing ad driven search, I’d be more impressed.Maybe if you removed the adds, and severely rate limited your own public facing search, so it’s more of a demo than an actual service. This would force you to solely make money off the API access, without directly competing against those customers.
That would be an honest buisness model. One that doesn’t turn users into eyeballs for advertising. Which seems to me, to be the most insidious problem of the modern internet.
Agree to disagree here, but I’ll refer to Cory Doctorow for a contextual vs behavioral/tracking ads comparison, one which is very good: https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#contextual-ads (applied to the media, but the general thread is relevant)
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which language are we talking?
Mojeek reminds me of early Google results which only searches title and inurl I like it
You can use Mojeek with SearXNvm with nothing enabled but Mojeek returned no results, I wonders why is that?I could be wrong but didn’t Mojeek also index results from Google and Bing?I’m wrong they index their own results, I mean Qwant is a search engine built in EU and they index their own resultsqwant is bing, mainly
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Not at all for me
not sure what’s happening there for you, speed is one of the things which people frequently say we do well for
Let me tell you about waiting for AskJeeves to load up in the 90s.
Web crawler indeed
Man, i wish i had the same experiencr
The couple of times I tried it out, the search results where barely accurate
Try kagi. It’s paid at $5/mo., but you get 300 searches to try it out.
I’d use it if its public instances didn’t get rate-limited so often
Been rocking self-hosted Searxng for the last 3 weeks now as my default search engine; it’s as good or better than DDG and certainly better than Google. Results I need are usually within the first three items, no extraneous shit.
I thought I’d just try it out, but it’s staying. The ability to tune the background engines is awesome. My search history is private (though I wasn’t that worried about DDG, there was no way in fuck I was using Kagi) since it’s running it’s searches via a VPN and returning me results locally.
it’s as good or better than
It’s only as good as the search engines you select. Which ones have you selected?
Defaults are working fine, I might have added one or two.
What does it default to? Google+bing+DDG?
Keep in mind that to protect your privacy you should also share your instance with others. All the searches are still linked to an IP which can be abused as well.
Yes, that’s the purpose of the VPN. It’s out there mixed in with everyone else that’s using that exit node.
Honestly, it’s not too much of a concern to me, I’m not doing anything illegal or naughty, it’s just making sure I’m not part of the dataset.
Yep, a VPN is a good solution.
How does it work self hosting? Is it querying other search engines or just maintaining a database on your server?
It’s a meta search engine: it aggregates results from multiple sources for your search query. So yes, it queries other search engines.
Its all calls to other engines, that you can choose and tune. So its making those calls and filtering out shit like AI results, and then ranking it to return back to you. Seems to do a good job.
How is it compared to DDG?
