Considering the potential of the fediverse, is there any version of that for search engines? Something to break up a major point of internet centralization, fragility, and inertia to change (eg Google will never, ever, offer IPFS searches). Not only would decentralization be inherently beneficial, it would mean we’re no longer compelled to hand over private information to centralized unvetted corporations like Google, Microsoft, and DuckDuckGo.

  • MtnPoo@beehaw.orgEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    We might be better off going back to web rings, word of mouth, and searching websites like Wikipedia and Imdb directly. I, for one, am sick of being funneled into the same bad results every time I search. The same old forum posts from 10 years ago with outdated information, many of which claim “your question was answered already!” followed by a dead link or a flame war.

  • 🦊 OneRedFox 🦊@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    SearXNG is probably the closest equivalent, as it’s decentralized, you can host your own, and you can grab search results from over 100 engines with it. Search engines don’t really federate like the Fediverse does; they just query each other as proxies for you and return the search results.

  • Pasketti@lemmy.jerick.xyzEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    No Federation, but Presearch is a Decentralized Search Engine that I’ve been using for ~6 months now. The results are about what I’d expect from your other major search engines. If you’re into crypto they also send you a small portion of their token as a reward when you search, although I don’t think they let you withdraw until you get a pretty large amount.

    There’s an addon for your browser you can download to have it be your default search engine too!