My problem seems to stem from the fact that my searches are often obscure and commercial interests probably wish I was searching for something else.

i was wondering what would it take to make a free/open/noncommercial search solution maintained by a collective (like wikipedia or something). search is too important to be ruined for everyone by corporations.

Ecosia is pretty sweet if you fancy helping the planet. It’s also privacy conscious as in does not sell or store any personally identifiable information. They also anonymize search data.

important to note that Ecosia does collect some non-personal information, such as search terms and click data, to improve search results and analyze usage patterns.

I don’t need a study to know that.

I switched to DuckDuckGo years ago, never looked back

By coincidence, yesterday I had to use my Virtual windows machine to test some windows software with a a scanner (my own machine is Linux). So i go to the browser in there, search for the brand and model for the driver and lo and behold, all the results were sponsored or incorrect. Correct the browser configuration to DuckDuckGo, retry, and there is the first result!

Now I know, DuckDuckGo is now apparently just Microsoft Bing, and I hate Microsoft, but at least this works. I know that DuckDuckGo is also getting worse and I’m about to look into self hosted open source alternatives, see what that gets me…

For most of my usual search any search engine does the job. For the rest :

https://fmhy.pages.dev/