2025-04-28 04:26 from IGnatius T Foobar
Subject: Re: search.citadel.org news
Well then I guess it's good that I get the latest SearxNG updates

because the big search engines probably don't enjoy being scraped by

someone who isn't going to serve ads to the user, and I'm guessing they

do an arms race thing there too.

I feel like there ought to be some sort of network for all the people

like us running small services below the radar of big tech.

Lots of search engines are hobby projects with meaningful sophistication. Definitively not up to the standards of comercial search engines, but they have their own strengths and some of them have public apis for you do do your scrapping because why the fuck not. Geeks have to stand together, right?


Marginalia is an interesting one because they try to index hobby sites only. When using it, you have the option to exclude sites with adware, cookies, or javascript. They also exclude AI generated content if the filter gets enabled. And they have an api.

Wiby is like the extremist version. Only pure minimalistic hobby sites get indexed, period. It is fun to use if you want to find random stuff that does not show up in regular searches.

By the way, you can find lots of interesting search engines by looking at the list of search engines supported by 4get.

Right. And we are on I2P [uncensored.i2p] for the benefit of those who need to remain anonymous. I'm thinking more in terms of non-anonymous on the clearnet but outside of the reach of goolag and fecesbook. Think of it more like a world of ham radio operators -- completely traceable, but Clear Channel can't mess with them.

It's a half baked idea, to be sure.