So I’ve tried out a few search engines but no matter where I look I can’t find a great answer.
- Qwant was decent for a bit but as I eventually found out they don’t use their own index.
- SearXNG, same as above.
- Mojeek was one of the first I went with but I often can’t find what I’m looking for when using it.
- Wikipedia gives me YaCy, Exalead, Opensearch, Gigablast, and Elasticsearch but either I can’t find the URL’s for them or they require I install something on my computer.
What did you all end up picking? And does it even matter if the back-end is American owned, do American companies make money from that (or does that give them inordinate control)?
Dunno about other search engines, but Opensearch and Elasticsearch are databases, not search engines. (Openseach is a fork of Elasticsearch, actually.)
[angry wikipedia moderator noises]
They’re literally search engines. They’re just not ones that come with an index of the web.
Literally, yes. They are engines that search data. You could index the web on them if you really wanted.
As to how they are used, correctly or not, I consider them closer to databases than “search engines” in the context of this post.
Seeing ES or OS in the same category as Gigasearch needed some distinction though.