I suspect that this is the direct result of AI generated content just overwhelming any real content.
I tried ddg, google, bing, quant, and none of them really help me find information I want these days.
Perplexity seems to work but I don’t like the idea of AI giving me “facts” since they are mostly based on other AI posts
ETA: someone suggested SearXNG and after using it a bit it seems to be much better compared to ddg and the rest.
So what about open source self hosted search engines? If it requires some hardware I’d gladly team up with a small group of people to finance a bigass server that just gets us our personal search engine
Any good ones out there?
There’s stuff like Searxng or whoogle, but these aren’t “real” search engines, merely “search aggregators” - they relay requests to a bunch of actual search engines, like bing or google, and aggregate the results. That’s why they don’t require tons of compute and scraping, and also why they often fail to work (since the search engines in question don’t like or allow this). I believe it’s not feasible to run a “real” search engine alone or even as a small group of people - according to this comment you need a powerful server with terabytes* of drive, hundreds of gigabytes of RAM and a lot of compute - and all of this will just let you crawl some top domains, nowhere near a good chunk of the internet.
*which sounds low actually, I would have expected more for this
Searxng, but there are plenty of instances already
Perplexica is interesting too, but it uses a moderate amount of ram because of elastic search.
And of course you need to have ollama running
Very cool