this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2026
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Search is dead for the foreseeable future. The “alternative” engines almost entirely use the Google or bing indexes and just give a layer of privacy (that is likely broken by Google having some secret fingerprinting technique)
Some, like DuckDuckGo, ecosia, and kagi, append the index with their own but still ultimately rely on Google and bing indexes to a significant degree. Though some of these are moving towards entirely independent indices (may take years)
Alternatively you can look at other countries indices, which are independent: baidu (China), yandex (Russia), mojeek (uk)
But ultimately web search is dead. Advertising and commercialization killed it. Advertising ruins everything, anyone who works in marketing should be put on a rocket and shot into the sun
Heard good things about https://github.com/searxng/searxng, but that requires some way to host it. And you'll probably end up tinkering to get it right, but pretty cool nonetheless.
As i mentioned elsewhere in the thread, you do not have to slefhost searx/searxng, there are lots and lots of public instances.
It’s better from a privacy standpoint but ultimately still depends on other search engines indices (which ultimately are largely Google and bing)
Searxng is a meta search engine, it basically sends your query to a bunch of providers and then ranks its own results based on criteria (eg does it appear in results from multiple providers)
I also forgot that brave has its own index, I don’t know much about it. I don’t fuck with brave stuff
Yes agreed. But it does give you tools that let you control how results are presented, which can help to create a good experience and remove AI results.