It is becoming near impossible to find relevant information from search engines. Duckduckgo, SearXNG, Bing, Google, and so many more mainstream engines have a significantly high noise to signal ratio, and it is getting worse.
Here are a collection of the best search engines I know, please add more to the list.
- Forum Search Engine: https://crowdview.ai/
- Non-commercial Search: https://search.marginalia.nu/
- Libre Meta Search Engine: https://librey.devol.it/
- Golden Age Search Engine: https://www.wiby.org/
- Yandex: https://yandex.com/
If no more high quality search engines exist, would it be possible to host your own?
EDIT: Some new discoveries. The addon uBlacklist and filters can block super SEO sites from appearing in search.
Why pay? I think the answer is pretty easy. If one doesn’t want to self host. Running any kind of web based service costs the person running it money. Google obviously makes money off of a user doing searches via adds and data collection. I would actually have no issue paying for certain Google services if it meant that as a paying customer they would not double dip and try and profit off the data they are collecting on me.
This is all coming from a person who has a server rack in my basement and multiple PCs scattered throughout my home, so I am no stranger to self hosting.
Excuse me sir, do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Savior, Richard Stallman?
People have spare pc’s or laptops they can sacrifice as a SearxNG instance. I too have a homelab & i have not paid a single penny to have a hobby SearxNG instance on my old hackbook pro that I share with friends.
I feel like, the internet is more than just paying your way for services. It’s about creating and sharing services and decentralization. If Kagi takes off then we have another evil Google that wants to profit at the cost of users, but its name is Kagi. It might be an impractical answer, and it does take some work to create a better internet. End of philosophical rant about the true spirit of the internet