Other decent search engine suggestions

General Privacy & Security
1

Did you consider, also, those? :slightly_smiling_face:

:earth_africa: Community-driven, decentralized FLOSS search engines

You asked if there is a search engine created and managed by a community, decentralized, with no tracking/cookies, based on FLOSS philosophy.
Here are the closest options:

:mag_right: 1. YaCy

  • What it is: a true P2P decentralized search engine.
  • Every user who installs YaCy becomes a “node” in the network and helps index the web.
  • FLOSS: fully open source.
  • Privacy: no centralized tracking, no personal logs—data stays on your computer.
  • Pros: the most “pure” project in terms of decentralization and FLOSS ethics.
  • Cons: result quality is lower than Google/Bing because the network is smaller and less powerful.

:point_right: Official site: yacy.net

:mag_right: 2. SearXNG (modern fork of Searx)

  • What it is: a community‑driven metasearch engine: it doesn’t have its own index but queries other engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.) and anonymizes all requests.
  • FLOSS: yes, open source with many community‑run instances.
  • Privacy: no tracking, no personal logs (depends on which instance you use—better to choose community‑trusted ones).
  • Pros: very high‑quality results, since it pulls from multiple search engines without exposing you to tracking.
  • Cons: not truly decentralized in terms of indexing (still depends on the “big guys”), but decentralized as a federated network of instances.

:point_right: Find public instances here: searx.space

:mag_right: 3. MetaGer

  • What it is: a German independent search engine, non‑profit, open source.
  • Not centralized like Google, but also not P2P like YaCy: run by a foundation.
  • Privacy: no tracking, open code, servers in Germany (strict data protection laws).
  • Pros: stable project, reliable, trusted for years.
  • Cons: not fully decentralized.

:point_right: metager.org

:sparkles: In summary

  • If you want the most decentralized, hardcore FLOSS solution → YaCy.
  • If you want the best balance between privacy and search quality (but less decentralized) → SearXNG.
  • If you prefer a stable, ethical, non‑profit project but not P2P → MetaGer.

:point_right: Simple formula:

  • YaCy = “grassroots engine”.
  • SearXNG = “best compromise: privacy + results”.
  • MetaGer = “ethical no‑profit centralization.”
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2

Except for SearXNG I was unaware of them. Thanks for the list, I will look into the others, but they seem for my use case to be worthy of support, but not ready for primary search use. I am skeptical that SearXNG is objectively the "best compromise: privacy + results” and am currently leaning toward giving paid kagi a try.

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There’s also mojeek out of the UK. Webcrawler. Own index. User privacy.

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Yes, thank you! :blush: but I tried to use it but too slow and bad quality search :sweat_smile:

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There’s also Mwmble and Stract.

Not FLOSS, right?

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MetaGer is no search engine. It’s a meta search machine. It asks different search providers for search results and merge them together. Since Yahoo refused MetaGer the connection, MetaGer closed its free service.

However, the organization behind work together with other EU-organizations (NGOs, companies, universities) to build an Open Search Index for EU (which has no search index at all). This could lead in a huge diversity of real search engines where also privacy respecting player can have direct access to the index and not just to a service on top as DuckDuckGo and MetaGer do.

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Right. I’d never really looked. :frowning:

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Interesting resource for comparing browsers. Note the summary in the box below, it is strictly limited to the connections made upon first startup. It does list the full URL for each connection and there is a bit of discussion.

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I’ve been trying out Murena Find. It’s “no tracking” search engine run by Quant. Europe based I believe.

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