Free Your Brain - #01: Alternative Search Engines
This is the first in a series of posts dedicated to helping you free yourself from the ways corporations are using internet users for profit to the user's detriment. I want to encourage exploration and the joy of the internet of my youth - of exploring and finding new pathways. This list is not comprehensive and it may grow to be outdated. Regardless, this was pretty successful on bsky, so I'm porting it over here! 1. Qwant - A very good replacement for Google. It is the most similar search engine on this list to Google's heyday. I get precise results compared to similar searches made on Google.
2. Wiby - Discover smaller sites that are typically made by hobbists or academics. This search engine focuses on sites that are older or lightweight (as in, less bloated by scripts that many modern sites rely on). Good for falling down a rabbit hole and finding blogs or personal websites!
3. Newgle - Search engine for sites that don't use certain generic top-level domains (that is what is the .com in tumblr.com). The disincluded domains include .com, .net and .org. I don't use this very often, and right now it seems to have a problem where it is indexing bsky.social (which is maybe not the kinds of things that someone would want to find while searching it) but nice to keep in mind.
4. Marginalia - Really good search engine for deep-diving and discovery. It's focus is on independence and on traditional information retrieval, rather than the natural-language search that google has oriented itself towards. It is meant as a compliment to other search engines.
5. Search my Site - Independent user-submitted site, great for personal web sites, but does not crawl the internet itself, so it is limited to what is sent in.
These are the one's that I use most and discover much on, but its far from the /only/ search engines out there. Here is a more complete list of search engines for your own perusal.
The internet is a wide place. Don't let corporations fool you into thinking it has been tamed. Instead, think of the corporate internet as a city, paved down and developed highly, but it cannot overtake the abundant wilds of the world.