Im noticing its harder and harder to find things on google. Searching for a companies quarterly profits, cost of medical care for all per capita, and othet economic details are all getting more and more buried in google. Just asking how other contries do their social programs results in us based opionion articles…like wtf are we even doing.
I understand scrolling and indexing sites is an enormous undertaking. Is there currently a federated open source search engine? If not is their a potential to create one?
Is there a trustworthy private option?
I’ll add that it’s a meta-search engine rather than something that does the actual searching itself. That’s still useful, but you’re limited by the quality of the upstream search engines (including google, duckduckgo, qwant, etc).
The gain from self-hosting is that you have more control over the results, and can do things like redirect social media sites to privacy friendly alternatives, and create your own bangs (or even add your own custom search engines).
Probably not a massive privacy gain though, although if you host the instance behind a privacy VPN queries won’t be associated with your IP at least.
Does DDG really generate its own searches? I was under the impression that it uses the Bing API. Maybe that’s outdated or only applies to certain types of search?