Now that Google is slowly but surely going to shits, i’m searching for a new search engine, and i was thinking, of going the extra mile and hosting my own, decentralized one, but which one should i choose (YACY, Presearch or Seeks), or are all of them not there yet?
I’ve been using different versions of SearX for a long while (sometimes on my server, sometimes through a provider like Disroot) as my standard search engine, since I’ve never had great luck with the big names, and it’s decent, but between upstream provider quota limits, and just the fact that it relies on corporate search APIs at all, sometimes the quality craters.
While I haven’t had the energy to run YaCy on my own, and public instances tend to not have a long life, I don’t have nearly as much experience with it, but when I have gotten to try it out, the search itself looked great, but generally didn’t have as broad or current an index. Long-term, though, it (and its protocol) is probably going to be the way to go, if only because a company can’t randomly tank it like they can with the meta-search systems or their own interfaces.
Looking at Presearch for the first time now, the search results look almost surprisingly good if poorly sorted, but the fact that I now know orders of magnitude more about their finances and their cryptocurrency token than what and how the thing actually searches makes me worry a bit about its future.