I’m quite crazy:

  • Marginalia with the no JavaScript filter, then with that filter turned off
    • Good for finding technical stuff, and sometimes recipes! I often find cool blogs this way.
  • SearxNG via farside.link
    • Unfortunately (and understandably) many of these sites use Anubis now, so I have to turn on JavaScript, and thanks to Google’s ratelimits the results are either fantastic or not helpful at all
    • But, the public instances can work, so I try with 3 instances before moving on

Depending on the thing I’m searching for, I have search shortcuts set up. These shortcuts are really handy. It seems much easier to get good results on dedicated search engines for each task, than finding another general purpose search engine that’s as good:

  • Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikidata
  • Some other wikis
  • Lemmy (of course!)
  • Peertube and podcast indexes
  • Websites of grocery shops near me

Finally, if all else has failed, I use Google (which still unfortunately happens at least a couple of times per day 🙁). Although, reading the posts now, I should switch this stage to DuckDuckGo instead.

I’d quite like to set up my own instance of SearxNG + YaCy at some point. It’d be nice to configure SearxNG to basically do all of these steps at once that I’m doing manually, use other engines to fill in the gaps, and then gradually fill in the gaps in my YaCy index.

Marginalia Search

search.marginalia.nu is a small independent do-it-yourself search engine for surprising but content-rich websites that never ask you to accept cookies or subscribe to newsletters. The goal is to bring you the sort of grass fed, free range HTML your grandma used to write.

search.marginalia.nu