In the meantime, the German-based GOOD search engine [0] might be alternative. It uses Brave’s independent search index, which according to [1] was also largely developed in Germany.
Yandex is also pretty good, they have their own index and it's a lot better than Google on political stuff (as long as the news isn't too recent) and any sort of torrent site.
I am not so helpful and exactly same news was posted may be 6 months back.
Qwant at its launch was immensely performant and they had the beautiful “lite.qwant.com” same as DuckDuckGo lite, but eventually they deprecated that and bloated the homepage.
Ecosia was also less cluttered and performant, now it feels like looking at a children’s book painting website or something and has more ads.
What I think will eventually happen is, both will collaborate and build the next generation of previous Yahoo! and fail.
Does anyone know how Ecosia/Qwant compare with Kagi? I have been a happy user of Kagi for years, but it wouldn't hurt to support a non-US alternative these days.
Qwant was my default for quite awhile before Kagi and their results were better than DDG, by far. They have had their own index for quite sometime, and will back-fill with Bing (iirc) if they have very few results, and Ecosia is just Bing, that's about it.
On Qwant your queries _may_ have to be phrased just slightly differently (more old school - less questions based such as "what is the standard bike chain size" and more keywords based such as "bike chain roller standard size") which is how it should be, overall imo.
They have very limited settings to fine-tune, but overall their results were great.
When I try to access Qwant I get "Unfortunately we are not yet available in your country". I don't think I've ever gotten this message from a search engine. I'm from Brazil.
I'd rather see an open, search index whose URL's and scraping properties are shared with others. Then, small players, even researchers, can just rescrape the likely-good sites to build their own local stores. The whole Web filtered down to what is likely to be useful and safe (no malware) for a wide variety of people.
If it needs to be paid for, then a commercial product that's priced by organization size. Given to researchers for free if their outputs are non-commercial or permissive licensed. Discounted otherwise. I usually start with how Windows is priced for personal or server use to be profitable and widely accessible.
That would let people re-create data sets like RefinedWeb without violating copyright law. You'd still have to consider terms of service, contract law, etc. We have stronger, legal defenses of scraping for internal use, especially non-commercial. Knocking out copyright issues would be a huge help.
In the meantime, the German-based GOOD search engine [0] might be alternative. It uses Brave’s independent search index, which according to [1] was also largely developed in Germany.
[0] https://good-search.org/
[1] https://en.reset.org/the-good-search-engine-web-search-witho...
Yandex is also pretty good, they have their own index and it's a lot better than Google on political stuff (as long as the news isn't too recent) and any sort of torrent site.
Europeans will not start using a Russian search engine.
Excellent! -- despite being overdue.
I hope these Europe-based joint ventures increase in every aspect.
I am not so helpful and exactly same news was posted may be 6 months back.
Qwant at its launch was immensely performant and they had the beautiful “lite.qwant.com” same as DuckDuckGo lite, but eventually they deprecated that and bloated the homepage.
Ecosia was also less cluttered and performant, now it feels like looking at a children’s book painting website or something and has more ads.
What I think will eventually happen is, both will collaborate and build the next generation of previous Yahoo! and fail.
I agree. Unfortunate because a https://www.mojeek.com/ and ecosia partnership would be genuinely fruitful.
> exactly same news was posted may be 6 months back.
Well this is the old article (maybe not 6 but few months).
Great!
Does anyone know how Ecosia/Qwant compare with Kagi? I have been a happy user of Kagi for years, but it wouldn't hurt to support a non-US alternative these days.
Qwant was my default for quite awhile before Kagi and their results were better than DDG, by far. They have had their own index for quite sometime, and will back-fill with Bing (iirc) if they have very few results, and Ecosia is just Bing, that's about it.
On Qwant your queries _may_ have to be phrased just slightly differently (more old school - less questions based such as "what is the standard bike chain size" and more keywords based such as "bike chain roller standard size") which is how it should be, overall imo.
They have very limited settings to fine-tune, but overall their results were great.
I find mojeek.com better than either of those, but slightly worse than google and on par-ish with bing (bing has further "reach", but worse quality).
When I try to access Qwant I get "Unfortunately we are not yet available in your country". I don't think I've ever gotten this message from a search engine. I'm from Brazil.
I'd rather see an open, search index whose URL's and scraping properties are shared with others. Then, small players, even researchers, can just rescrape the likely-good sites to build their own local stores. The whole Web filtered down to what is likely to be useful and safe (no malware) for a wide variety of people.
If it needs to be paid for, then a commercial product that's priced by organization size. Given to researchers for free if their outputs are non-commercial or permissive licensed. Discounted otherwise. I usually start with how Windows is priced for personal or server use to be profitable and widely accessible.
That would let people re-create data sets like RefinedWeb without violating copyright law. You'd still have to consider terms of service, contract law, etc. We have stronger, legal defenses of scraping for internal use, especially non-commercial. Knocking out copyright issues would be a huge help.
https://commoncrawl.org/
I pay for Kagi, and I wouldn't mind paying as much for a European sovereign alternative.
Very nice.
Due to recent events I'm trying to divest from US tech as much as possible.
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