Startpage used to have a “co-company” called Ixquick which was a metasearch engine (pulling results from 14 different other engines), which I greatly preferred, but sadly it was shut down in 2016 in favor of the Google-only Startpage.
(The pull of dark forces is strong, I guess. But, actually, it may have been about reducing expenditures.)
Before Whoogle, I deployed SearXNG and LibreY, but they were highly susceptible to ratelimiting, so fetching search results were unreliable. By default, SearXNG is configured with aggregating Brave, DuckDuckGo, Google, and Qwant, while LibreY is configured to switch between scraping DuckDuckGo and Google. The only one I have not deployed yet is 4get, which by default is configured with DuckDuckGo.
Literally “scrapping,” or “scraping,” rather?
Edit: I wasn’t sure which action you were referring to, as either of those would be possible in this case.
My point is that privacy-focused metasearch engines have various issues of their own other than financial cost. After deploying LibreY and SearXNG, rate limiting ultimately forced me to explore other options, but I also had to consider what default search engines to configure, accessible Tor Browser user experience with the Security Level slider set to Safest, in-built integration with other privacy front-ends (URL rewrites), how maintained the software repository was, etc. Reducing administration complexity allowed me to focus on allocating resources towards other projects.
I wonder how this compares to Mojeek, which already exists:
Maybe Ecosia and Qwant are bigger actors, who can create something bigger? I think Mojeek’s index is still quite small compared to the big ones.
Mojeek’s index is over six billion pages as of October 2022, but it is also closed-source with highly variable search results, contrary to their claim and based on experience:
Most of their other claims are accurate to various degrees.
May be this is related https://news.infomaniak.com/en/ethical-artificial-intelligence/ though not for search, they are targeting for personal productivity, but focusing on privacy.
Infomaniak’s AI implementation is based on sorting information from their own email and cloud service:
@FranklyFlawless I have looked a bit more into your Woogle Search instance and I have 2 comments:
comparing it with Startpage search results, I found some differences - especially in the ranking positions (but less in terms of the results themselves.) I wonder why, since you mentioned that Startpage was itself using Google under the hood. Both engines should then be similar in ranking as well, shoudn’t they? Maybe this could be explained if Startpage is also mixing results from other sources, like a metasearch engine (which its predecessor ixquick was)
looking at the FF network console to see what it loads, I found out only 2 js scripts:
Anyway thanks for this useful URL
WHOOGLE_AUTOCOMPLETE environment variable with the value of 0 to disable the autocomplete JavaScript, but there does not seem to be an environment variable to disable the controller JavaScript, which is responsible for autofocusing the search field and minimizing the configuration layout. For now, assuming you are using the uBlock Origin web extension, you can use this static filter rule to disable it without exception:||whoogle.franklyflawless.org/static/build/controller.d5f7f262.js$script,domain=whoogle.franklyflawless.org,important