Even though it was a proprietary solution (with an open source base), I really miss #GigaBlast - last I checked there was still no word on why it went offline about a year ago.
Any plans to add !bangs in @Mojeek? Bangs was the main reason #DuckDuckGo was my default search engine for so long.
I've kept #Mojeek there for a few weeks, but I keep switching to DDG just for the bangs 😕
I suppose a better solution would be to include bang-like functionality directly in #Firefox because why hit an external website, but not sure if any plugins make it at seamless? 🧩
@Mojeek, something else for that big list of requests: a way to reach your cache. Google just discontinued¹ access to their cache. Cache access is extremely important because #Mojeek search results often lead to exclusive gate-kept websites like Cloudflare. We need a way to reach that content when it appears in search results. This is what stops me from using Mojeek. #Searx instances offer a cache option (though they cheat and just redirect to archive.org).
Long-shot: are there any mojeek syndicates that have a search UI that offers a mirror or cache alternate link?
BTW, your article mentions #Gigablast but i think they’re gone now.
It’s unclear what happened with Google. They said they will stop caching sites but that’s obviously not true because they need the cache inherently for indexation. Which suggests they intend to make it inaccessible to the public. Though if that’s true, then it would be all-or-nothing, not continued access to old caches.
Following up on an earlier discussion today about #Brave browser (and search), I want to lament the loss of the #Gigablast#SearchEngine which was the last I know of which honored giving results which only included words immediately prefixed with '+'. A decade or so ago these kind of result filters were fairly common; then the rare "advanced search" option, now nothing (that I can find).
So I #lament.
And I acknowledge that I may not have looked hard enough in all the right nooks & crannies.
@zeh@alcinnz
>have been seeing the worse results from duckduckgo
We're not the only ones who have been complaining about this recently. I was very happy with DDG for years and I still really like the fact that I can search the Free Software Directory by adding !fsd to my keywords. But their general search results have gone massively downhill in the last year or two, and I blame Bing.
#Gigablast ← does their own crawling, but what happened?.. they were dissolved last year & seem to now be www.alltheinternet.com
#Ombrelo ← a proxy but more advanced than the others (filters/downranks Cloudflare sites)
#YaCy is notable because it’s a crawler that you can install and operate yourself. YaCy instances can be public-facing and they can also share indexes with each other fedi style apparently. Some Searx instances tap YaCy instances.
I would love to find a searx or 4get instance that rejects the tech giants, but aggregates from YaCy, mojeek, gigablast, metager, maginalia.nu, frogfind.com, & wiby.me.
And I would love it even more if it would make replacements: