https://www.marginalia.nu/

Teclis - Includes search results from Marginalia, free to use at the moment. This search index has been in the past closed down due to abuse.

Kagi, whose creation Teclis is, is a paid search engine (metasearch engine to be more precise) also incorporates these search results in their normal searches. I warmly recommend giving Kagi a try, it's great, I've been enjoying it a lot.

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Other options I can recommend; You could always try to host your own search engine if you have list of small-web sites in mind or don't mind spending some effort collecting such list. I personally host Yacy [github link] (and Searxng to interface with yacy and several other self-hosted indexes/search engines such as kiwix wiki's.). Indexing and crawling your own search results surprisingly is not resource heavy at all, and can be run on your personal machine in the background.

Try this engine

https://search.marginalia.nu/

Or a SearXNG instance

https://search.disroot.org/search

You may also be interested in the Indie Web movement. This site is a great resource for it, with yet more links to indie sites and blogs.

Finally, not quite what you asked but here's a freebie, in case you didn't know about it:

https://wiby.me/

It's an old web search engine. It only indexes pages from the 00s and earlier.

This is a great question, in that it made me wonder why the Fediverse hasn't come up with a distributed search engine yet. I can see the general shape of a system, and it'd require some novel solutions to keep it scalable while still allowing reasonably complex queries. The biggest problems with search engines is that they're all scanning the entire internet and generating a huge percent of all internet traffic; they're all creating their own indexes, which is computationally expensive; their indexes are huge, which is space-expensive; and quality query results require a fair amount of computing resources.

A distributed search engine, with something like a DHT for the index, with partitioning and replication, and a moderation system to control bad actors and trojan nodes. DDG and SearX are sort of front ends for a system like this, except that they just hand off the queries to one (or two) of the big monolithic engines.

You're looking for Kagi.com

Not only does it give better search results quality wise on "the big web" - you can select to search specific parts, like blogs.

Best part - it's completely ad and spam free. You pay for it with actual money instead of with your data.

Google are the ones who have really gone down the toilet in recent years. They ditched cached pages, soured search results with paid ads and even their image search is as bad as Tineye for reverse image searching these days. Literally the only thing Alphabet really have going for them anymore is Android and YouTube.

It's baffling that a company which was once so dominant in the web search space that their name was literally used as a verb for looking things up for decades have now enshittified their flagship product so much that they're making rivals like Bing, Lycos, Duckduckgo, etc look like viable alternatives.

Maybe try Mojeek, it uses completely independent indexing system.

Offtopic but ddg is a bing frontend so they should share the same results.

I'm building my own. Keep you posted.

http://wiby.me/

The more obscure a web page is, the more likely it is to be indexed only by the large search engines (i.e. Google). There are search queries that return 0 results on DDG, but quite a few (relatively) obscure websites on Google. This is simply because the more money a search engine operator has, the more websites it will index.

So what you want is kind of contradictory.

Don't know if this fits your criteria, but I've been using Gruble a lot recently. You can personalise the look and language in the settings, plus it's open source.

If you want blogs, I recommend you use gemini: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

Download Lagrange and begin browsing. It's basically a small-web of personal blogs.

Before google existed I used https://www.metacrawler.com it appears to still be around. I have not used it in a long time, so I know nothing about it any longer.