this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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[–] shadow@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Ah man, same. Thought I'd give it a go after reading about if from Cory...

Honestly, for what I search for, DDG is sufficient, and it's not gonna hassle me about subscriptions.

What I'd really like to find is something like a pihole for search, where you have your blocklist, cache of things you've searched already (your own mini search engine?), and then a fallback engine (DDG, bing, Google, whatever) for things it doesn't already know.

I dunno. Search and AI botshit is everywhere, and it's gonna keep getting worse. Self-hosting tools seems to be the only way to take control back.

[–] ahopefullycuterrobot@awful.systems 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I was trying and failing to do something like that. Basically, using ArchiveBox to download bookmarks, and then use recoll to index the webpages + PDFs + my own writing. Assumption was that I probably already bookmarked or had copies of what I wanted and just needed a quick way to find them. Was eventually going to import my browsing history as well. It ended up being more trouble than it was worth. (Too many bookmarks, not enough disk space, didn't know what the best setting for ArchiveBox were, Archivebox has its own search and I wasn't sure how that compared to recoll, unsure most efficient way to delete useless downloaded pages or curate them, etc.)

I do use uBlacklist and the Huge AI Blocklist subscription to try to clean up my search results. Not sure how effective they are over all though.

[–] chamomile@furry.engineer 8 points 7 months ago (2 children)

@shadow @V0ldek > What I’d really like to find is something like a pihole for search, where you have your blocklist, cache of things you’ve searched already (your own mini search engine?), and then a fallback engine (DDG, bing, Google, whatever) for things it doesn’t already know.

I think SearXNG sort of fulfills this, from what I've heard? It's more or less a self-hosted search engine that can combine indexes from various other engines, and I presume that means you can set your own rules and filters and such. There are public instances as well.

[–] shadow@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 7 months ago

I will check out self hosting searxng

The searxng public instances tend to be a bit shit.

They're slow. Maybe only several seconds but that feels like an eternity in 2024.

They also frequently seem to be blocked by the services they're scraping.

[–] fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Isn't the DDG guy an asshole as well though?

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de -2 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What I'm saying is that for Kagi you have to pay a direct subscription. DDG you can just use for free.

[–] fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de -4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What I'm saying is that free things arent really free.

[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 6 points 7 months ago

+5, insightful.