"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
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@eliasulrich oh man, I could really get into using this one
Kagi.com is apparently good too, but uses google’s search index so need subscription
@gimulnautti @eliasulrich ... and is an AI company in disguise
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@marginalia @joepie91 @miramarmike @eliasulrich Actually there's an EU initiative for exactly this. It has multiple crawlers (Quant is one of them) who aggregate it as one.
@Kyebr @marginalia @miramarmike @eliasulrich which initiative is this? I've generally been pretty unhappy with how a lot of EU funding goes to for-profit startup-y things with all the same bad incentives, so I'm curious to see if there's something different about this one
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"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
It's called #MarginaliaSearch.
It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.
What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.
There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.
It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."
@eliasulrich May I recommend Neosearch.org it’s a small project that uses Google And an LLM. But the results are well sorted , concise and as far as I can see 0 tracking or ads.
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@eliasulrich Why won't they let us have nice things?
"The search engine is currently under being hit so aggressively by bots it's interfering with the ability to serve regular search traffic. Emergency anti-scraping measures are enabled. Sorry about the inconvenience."@Devonkiwi @eliasulrich The online equivalent of sending the boys round to break the windows and intimidate the customers of a competitor.
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@eliasulrich Why won't they let us have nice things?
"The search engine is currently under being hit so aggressively by bots it's interfering with the ability to serve regular search traffic. Emergency anti-scraping measures are enabled. Sorry about the inconvenience."@Devonkiwi @eliasulrich
Thank you! -
@Kyebr @marginalia @miramarmike @eliasulrich which initiative is this? I've generally been pretty unhappy with how a lot of EU funding goes to for-profit startup-y things with all the same bad incentives, so I'm curious to see if there's something different about this one
@joepie91 @Kyebr @miramarmike @eliasulrich
EU funding is kinda all over the map, but I've gotten some of it at least. There's generally a problem with a lot of big talkers and not a lot of actual doers in this space. Actually having something to show has made finding funding surprisingly easy.
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"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
It's called #MarginaliaSearch.
It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.
What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.
There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.
It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."
@eliasulrich Thanks for sharing this. It's cool and old school. Like the early web when you wanted to learn more about things and not just buy stuff.
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"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
It's called #MarginaliaSearch.
It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.
What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.
There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.
It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."
@eliasulrich this is actually awesome, it just saved me like an hour of work on my first try
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"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
It's called #MarginaliaSearch.
It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.
What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.
There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.
It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."
It looks great, going to start using it today

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@eliasulrich May I recommend Neosearch.org it’s a small project that uses Google And an LLM. But the results are well sorted , concise and as far as I can see 0 tracking or ads.
@64bithero @eliasulrich If it uses Google and an LLM it's part of the problem and not solving anything.
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@eliasulrich May I recommend Neosearch.org it’s a small project that uses Google And an LLM. But the results are well sorted , concise and as far as I can see 0 tracking or ads.
@64bithero @eliasulrich What didn't you understand of the reason of OP?
Anyway, for fun, I still went on it and thought it was maybe be as a sarcasm.
Screenshot attached for laugh.
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"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
It's called #MarginaliaSearch.
It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.
What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.
There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.
It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."
@eliasulrich I am going to spend the rest of the evening looking at all the random things on the Explore Websites tab.
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@Kyebr @marginalia @miramarmike @eliasulrich which initiative is this? I've generally been pretty unhappy with how a lot of EU funding goes to for-profit startup-y things with all the same bad incentives, so I'm curious to see if there's something different about this one
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@Kyebr @marginalia @miramarmike @eliasulrich thanks. unfortunately it seems to lean heavily into the "AI" thing and still follow a strongly centralized structure (just a government instead of a corp this time), so it seems of marginal value to me, personally...
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"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
It's called #MarginaliaSearch.
It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.
What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.
There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.
It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."
@eliasulrich Interesting! By reading that, I remember that #YaCy is still around, haven't had a look to this projects for over a decade, but I guess they made some progress, too

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"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
It's called #MarginaliaSearch.
It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.
What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.
There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.
It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."
Thanks for sharing.

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@eliasulrich not very good though, hopefully it gets better.
I did a search for my name as I have had a blog for over 20 years, didn't come up.
@miramarmike @eliasulrich So it's anti-stalking.
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"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
It's called #MarginaliaSearch.
It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.
What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.
There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.
It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."
@eliasulrich Something other than Google -- that sounds wonderful. But technical achievement aside, what makes Google succeed is money. From other comments it appears you received some funding from a government agency? What is going to be the source of funding to keep the lights on for this project?
Seems to me the practical consideration of who's paying for it needs to be given consideration and mention.
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"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
It's called #MarginaliaSearch.
It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.
What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.
There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.
It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."
I definitely like that somebody has managed to get as far as this. Until I saw this I was worried that we might have gotten to the point where the barrier to entry was too high for any new search engines to get created. It would be concerning if we were forever stuck with only Microsoft, Google, and third party frontends for those two.
I am concerned whether that search engine will survive with donations as the only source of income. If he gets more users the service might get more expensive to keep up.
One thing that does put me off a little bit is that most of the URLs in the search results are censored and that every link away from the site goes through a redirector that obscures the URL.
But I sure hope it will be successful, as we need alternatives to the big two.
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"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.
It's called #MarginaliaSearch.
It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.
What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.
There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.
It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."
@eliasulrich Reminds me of when Google said that the left hand column of results would remain pristine.
How profit crushes promises.