#DuckDuckGo, always the obvious "not Google" choice; but ISTR them having their own ethical quandaries? & are "just Bing"? Brief trial "feels good” tho, need to dig more.
#Ecosia sounds like a nice idea, but is probably just greenwashing?
#Marginalia is cool but not quite the same level as Goog/DDG/Kagi, too narrowly focused to be a catchall.
@SnoopJ@bitprophet my hope is that all these players will suddenly rise up and start challenging as Google continues to falter. It's like when the king gets sick (poison) and all the rest of the royal family come flocking over to try and turn the situation to their favor.
@bitprophet@SnoopJ@grumpasaurus I can just imagine the C-suite over at Yahoo trying to figure out how to spend their money (since clearly they aren't building anything with it).
"Bro, let's buy AOL. You never know. It could come back."
@aburka@tyrel exactly this. they had 1-2 strikes from the whole “why no, we will not hide 'how to suicide yourself' results from obviously suicidal searchers” thing a couple years back, for exactly the same “wow why are you even upset about this, that makes no sense, anyway tech is apolitical and perfectly neutral" kind of non-response.
so the Brave blowup and their similar non-response was extremely disappointing. But see that thread linked, he puts it really well.
@Buggy Ironically, I don't actually need that - I have my own intermediary service that does this kind of thing on my behalf (with superpowers!) so if anything I want a search index that has a good API, ha!
A newer rendition I'm using/developing now is in Rust and not public yet, but so far very much similar design: take urlbar search string as get param, process it for what is essentially a command-line interface, and do various lookups/redirects.
@aburka@Buggy eg, “py struct” looks up python3 stdlib for the struct module and goes straight there, or does a fulltext search of same if no exact hit. "rs Option" searches the rust stdlib docs for 'Option’. "crate" and “pp" search crates and pypi respectively. etc etc.
many of these could be replaced by various browser and/or search-engine features, but as soon as you get beyond simple “search this or that site”, this technique starts becoming worth its small latency hit :)
@bitprophet: we are experimenting with our own index (currently mainly with Polish websites, but also expanding our English index) and pushing to use it solely in the future, maybe consider trying us out?
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