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Reblogged by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
greytheearthling@queer.party ("Grey the earthling") wrote:
@cstanhope @requiem Recently I've found SearXNG (e.g. https://searxng.ch) surprisingly capable (with caveats).
In the list of Engines in the Settings, I switched off Google (and Brave, because no thanks cryptocurrency-homophobia man); I switched on Alexandria, Mwmbl, Wiby, Yacy, Curlie and Wikidata.
Quite often the useful results come from these engines, especially about clearly-identifiable entities (people, places, organisations, physical things; as opposed to news stories and programming syntax).
Alexandria and Mwmbl *are* general-purpose search engines, but their results feel sober, like pre-evil Google — even when a result isn't what I wanted, I can see why it came up. Yacy is just-about-federated (but isn't *really* what you want, as it's not a subjective network-of-trust like Scuttlebutt). Curlie is DMOZ, and Wikidata is also like a library.
You can use Wikipedia to provide autocomplete suggestions, which IMO is genius.
I also have Bing and DuckDuckGo switched on to fill in the gaps, and I still often fall back on DDG. SearXNG implements the same list of “bangs” as DDG but with “!!” so this is as easy as appending “!!ddg” (or “!!w” for Wikipedia etc).
For your use-case, you *could* disable all of the general-purpose engines, and just enable the structured-data library/encyclopedia–type ones.