Browsing the web I came across this (meta) search engine. From the first glance, it seems promising and giving quite a good results to my searches. Definitely better than Google, Bing or DDG, which tend to be full of SEO/ads/AI bullshit these days. Does anyone use it?
It somehow implies it’s open source and indeed there is github https://github.com/PresearchOfficial too, but I can’t find any link from the presearch.com itself to it. It’s just… IDK, weird?
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I’m immediately suspicious of anything that says “earn crypto rewards” so that’s a “no” from me.
I just use Searx-NG as my meta search engine, and it’s been pretty good.
There’s another self-hosted actual search engine (with its own dataset + crawler) but I forget its name off the top of my head. I’ve been looking into setting that up to experiment with.
I used to, until they started changing links for actual results to have trackers built in. I couldn’t click on specific websites i was searching for without my adblock putting a stop to it. Asked them about it in their discord and they basically told me to turn off adblock. Dropped them like a sack of potatoes and spun up a SearXNG instance. Before that I thought about spinning up a presearch node. Glad I switched to SearXNG. It basically accomplished what I wanted from Presearch without the ads and crypto shitcoin.
If I had to switch to a new engine not run by me, I’d consider Qwant or maybe Kagi if paying for it is worth it. I’m old enough to be used to having stuff for free on the internet, doing it yourself to keep from having to pay for a service is a perfectly fine option for me.
My search engine lineage: Alta Vista
Yahoo
Dogpile
Metacrawler
Google
Cuil
Google
DDG
Google
Presearch
My own SearXNG instance
Wow, that trackers bullshit is even worse than I thought.
After all I’m glad that I asked. Something felt fishy about Presearch from the start and I couldn’t pin point what exactly. Reading through all the terms and technicalities was exhausting, so this thread was nice kind of tldr.
Thanks everyone.
Yeah, I would-be been fine if they just added a listing that was actually an ad, but replacing actual results with no option to not click the tracking injected link was enough for me. Ignoring their shitcoin is fine, it’s not required to use their search. But I don’t take kindly to bullshit if it’s forced on me.
Thank you for showing me SearXNG. I will definitely be looking into it, and once comfortable maybe even host one internally.
Of all the things I’ve self hosted, it’s by far the easiest. TrueNAS scale’s kubernetes chart was pretty install and run. See ya over in [email protected]
Presearch make proxy call to google, they add the wall and their own tracking and their own ads. Stay away.
In fact, stay away any project that have web3 or crypto
Yeah, if it says Crypto on it, it’s a scam. Full stop.
That crypto part must be new, it definitely wasn’t there some time ago. Anyway, glad I’m not the only one smelling something fishy in this…
