An Actually Good Search Engine You've Probably Never Heard About

[Arnox]

US Version: https://baresearch.org/
EU Version: https://searx.be/
AU Version: https://priv.au
You can also find a list of instances running it here: https://searx.space/

SearX (now forked and continued with SearXNG) is an open-source metasearch engine that seems to do an eerily good job pointing you right to the site you want without the typical search engine bullshit cluttering up the results. I used to use Brave Search, and occasionally, I still do along with Google when I want a second and/or third opinion (and of course, we can't forget Bing for porn, can we), but recently, I stumbled back onto this search engine and quickly grew to love it. It even has a "cache" link next to each result that redirects you to the archive.org saved version of that page (if one exists). Just don't rely on its image search very much at all though because it's not very good at all. Google still seems to do the best for images probably because of the sheer volume of images in its index it gets to comb through.

(To add it to Firefox, go to the site and then right click the address bar and select the option to add the site to the list of available search engines.)

 

[Vendor-Lazarus]

Trash. It's just a SearX instance. One where you need to not only trust that the instance owner isn't a man-in-the-middle data-aggregator, but also a meta-search engine where you need to change the default ones. The default being woke, biased, and censorious bing, Presearch (which is just another proxy for bing and google [https://news.presearch.io/what-is-mainnet-and-why-is-it-so-monumental-for-presearch-7c575f9e814d]), startpage (another google proxy [google also being woke, politically biased, and censorious]), yahoo (bing proxy), and Ask (bing proxy).

It does also use Mojeek, Wiby, Alexandria, Stract, and Yep, which are not using google or bing at the backend. But a searX instance should only be using those, and Brave search and Right Dao.

 

[Arnox]

Trash. It's just a SearX instance. One where you need to not only trust that the instance owner isn't a man-in-the-middle data-aggregator, but also a meta-search engine where you need to change the default ones. The default being woke, biased, and censorious bing, Presearch (which is just another proxy for bing and google [https://news.presearch.io/what-is-mainnet-and-why-is-it-so-monumental-for-presearch-7c575f9e814d]), startpage (another google proxy [google also being woke, politically biased, and censorious]), yahoo (bing proxy), and Ask (bing proxy).

It does also use Mojeek, Wiby, Alexandria, Stract, and Yep, which are not using google or bing at the backend. But a searX instance should only be using those, and Brave search and Right Dao.

As I understand it, the way SearX works is that it pulls from the database of a bunch of other search engines while doing it entirely anonymously. Further, remember that when you put a query into ANY search engine, meta or otherwise, you are trusting that site with the simple data of what your query is. That is unavoidable really, and you should be using anti-fingerprinting and a VPN anyway. You have to give a website SOME kind of data, technically speaking, even if it's just merely what page you want fetched and what URLs on the site you click on, if any. But although you have to give a website something, you should still generally trust a site as little as you can.

But yeah, can you give me an example of a website Google has recently censored so I can see if SearX will pull it up?

EDIT: The EU version that I posted in the OP seems to have a much stronger index behind it. Searching for intosanctuary pulls it right up on the EU version, but the US version could barely find a mention of us.

EDIT2: Added the AU version as it seemed to have the best blend of search engines.

 

[Signa]

Google has been blocking my searches for using a VPN, so any functional alternatives is appreciated

 

[Arnox]

Google has been blocking my searches for using a VPN, so any functional alternatives is appreciated

Strange. It seems to be working for me.

 

[Signa]

Strange. It seems to be working for me.

100% my experience, but I end the story a little differently.

 

[Arnox]

100% my experience, but I end the story a little differently.

Gold. Yeah though, fuck Google Captcha. Sometimes it'll work totally fine, and other times, it'll be a little bitch. And I don't have any issues with any other captcha. It just seems to be Google's special snowflake captcha. Thankfully, I don't run into it very often at all though.

 

[LemonSquid]

Fagan Finder - faganfinder.com

I came across this tool this evening. It's not so much a search engine, but rather a collection of search systems, many of which have descriptions printed lower down on the page. It's got several search engines to choose from, but also tools to search encyclopedias, social media, libraries, news, etc. It seems pretty neat and useful, and all the links I've tried have linked directly to the content. Apparently it's been in service, under the same control/ownership, since 2001.

 

[Arnox]

Fagan Finder - faganfinder.com

I came across this tool this evening. It's not so much a search engine, but rather a collection of search systems, many of which have descriptions printed lower down on the page. It's got several search engines to choose from, but also tools to search encyclopedias, social media, libraries, news, etc. It seems pretty neat and useful, and all the links I've tried have linked directly to the content. Apparently it's been in service, under the same control/ownership, since 2001.

I've never heard about this one ever. How does it compare to SearXNG? Image search?