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Any “small-web” search engines? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/technology

78 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I use Duckduckgo, but I realised these big(ish) search engines give me all the commercialised results. Duckduckgo has been going down the slope for years, but not at such a rate as Google or Bing has.

I want to have a search engine that gives me all the small blogs and personal sites.

Does something like this exist?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The more obscure a web page is, the more likely it is to be indexed only by the large search engines (i.e. Google). There are search queries that return 0 results on DDG, but quite a few (relatively) obscure websites on Google. This is simply because the more money a search engine operator has, the more websites it will index.

So what you want is kind of contradictory.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Although Google indeed is the greatest indexer of the World Wide Web, unfortunately, the SEO and the AI makes it so hard to find something, for example, from before 2000s, such as BBS List archives, old blogosphere and personal webpages from that time, simply because they had no modern SEO nor AI keywords at that time. These old content are entirely free from AI-generated slop, (almost) free from dis- and mis-informations (because, at the time of BBS and Gopher, the Internet was still being born, and books were the main source of knowledge), so old content is sine qua non for one that's seeking real knowledge.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

(almost) free from dis- and mis-informations (because, at the time of BBS and Gopher, the Internet was still being born

Yeah, no. There was tons of bullshit. I ran across a post back then saying you could get psychic powers by eating the Americium sensor in your fire detector.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah, almost free. Nowadays there are LLMs (~~Google's Gemini~~ ahem) recommending people "to eat their daily rocks to be healthy". Now I see exactly where the AI got these absurdity from. lol