For a search engine only serving one person (self hosting probably won’t have many simultaneous client connections) you could probably get away with ssd’s for the database instead of RAM for the whole thing and the front end should be light enough to run on the same system. And aside from the delay of initially building the index, the crawling to keep updating shouldn’t matter that it’s slower than an enterprise competitor… this actually might be much less resource intense than I thought.
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I tried YaCy in p2p mode on my home laptop. It works fine with very low specs (like a few GB of RAM and <100 GB hard drive), thanks to the p2p mode. Yes, it delays the search results, because one has to constantly exchange the data with other servers, but it’s usable.
The actual (current) problem of YaCy is that there are not enough peers, so the search results are much worse than those in DDG. I hope more people join the network.
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Brave works on a different principle than DDG. DDG is more of a database rather than a crawler. Brave does some crawling but it isn’t nearly as prolific as google. Therefore the results are to be expected, somewhat different.
My results on brave vary greatly compared to DDG. When comparing DDG to google, the results are mildly different.
An alternative is using presearch, which I am quite excited for. The search results are supposed to be provided by a decentralized network of nodes, which seems promising. I have not looked too much into that, but it would be good if they are open source and if not, 3rd party audited.
The problem really is that more than likely, DDG have seen a huge surge in users wanting to stop tracking or an uptick in popularity. Back in the good ole days, the internet had multiple search engines of similar quality…we should get back to that in mindset…meaning, use different search engines in our behavior.
Thank you! I installed it 
Just curious to know: no app for iPhone?
I’m glad you mentioned preseach, as I’ve been looking into that as well. I like their approach and have already added it to my search engine list.
I did not see such app. Maybe I just missed it, but see this:
How are your results? I have considered running a node just for my love of privacy.
i insstalled it on arch. how the hell do you get tthe thing started?? lol
on the install page, it says to run startYACY.sh. there is no startYACY after the install…though i installed it from the AUR
i’ll have to look more into it.
how do the results compare to other search engines?
i used DDG for a long time, and i’ll be honest… the results sucked. soon as i put the same search into google, the pertinent results would come up. And now with this news…
DDG got to GO bye bye screw them!!
nevermind, i got it…had to start it through systemctl
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Presearch anyone?
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Shame about the fonts on their website. 
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I’m wondering about the fanfare for Presearch when they have a 'Director of Advertiser Relations’ and the Co-Founder is in charge of Marketing.
Google sucks precisely because of a business model that must keep advertisers happy.
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Why would you want to see disinformation? Yes that feature can be used for censoring other things than disinformation but you can also drive over people with a car. It’s just a tool and people at ddg decide how to use it. If you have trusted duck this long, I don’t see why you would stop trusting it now. Disinformation can hurt people like for example if someone says that drinking bleach will heal cancer. I have seen few services where nothing is censored and it’s full of political propaganda and disinformation which is not good for anyone.
Because sometimes it is only someone’s opinion about what is disinformation and what is information - and I am able to form my own opinions, without having the government or the search engine or anyone else tell me what my opinion is.
I don’t want to give examples because if I do then this topic will degenerate into a squabble about who is right and who is wrong in the particular example(s) that I give.
Yes. It needs better control on the client side to manage the clutter, sort the wheat from the chaff.
I think you would see that anything I wrote above about “disinformation” applies equally to “political propaganda”.
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If readers practiced due diligence like they were supposed to we wouldn’t have any of these problems.
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A very sad news. Over time, the oligarchy of the technology sector (Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Amazon, etc.) becomes more and more intrusive, increasingly controlling all sectors and aspects of an increasingly lobotomized society.
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Thanks to the postings here, I am no longer using duckduckgo.
Marking something as valid information or disinformation based on the source where it comes from is not the way to go. A few weeks ago I was at the Ukrainian border to pick someone up. I witnessed some weird things, and the “official” news in germany reported the exact opposite of what I witnessed. I do not know what the russian media reported because those sources are banned here. I could read an “accurate” report on Al Jazeera. That does not mean I now trust Al Jazeera more than the local news, it is not that simple.
Sometimes source A lies and source B speaks the truth, if there is such a thing as truth. Sometimes it’s the other way around and B lies. If you now censor B, you are left with only A, plus the new feature that A can report whatever they want as truth, because A equals truth. And because B, the liars, have been banned now, we can shut down our brains and just directly believe everything A writes.
If you trust the judgement of people/users, you do not need censorship. Now, duckduckgo is basically telling me, that I am too dumb to process or classify information myself.
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HI ,
in the last weeks I was ashamed of being Italian… one of the most important italian newspaper (La Stampa) used a picture of a bombed square in Donestk describing it as Kiev and a couple of news channel showed video games images described as images of night bombing…embarrassing…
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This does not imply ugly behavior from their side. I guess Purism also has people dealing with marketing. No? They must survive somehow.
I tried yacy but the results look very limited (to the peers). The model of presearch looks interesting though. Is it so bad? For the moment it gives me good results. I think better than DDG.
Am I missing something with presearch? I tried to look into it, but their website and “white paper” seemed almost entirely marketing fluff and buzzwords, with very few technical details. Sticking with Brave Search+Searx+Whoogle for now.
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