Technology
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Which alternatives should one consider?
Searx. It is a meta search engine but imho is the best one out there
Still needs better UX/UI if it ever wants to get close to being used by average folk. That's how DDG and Startpage grew so much.
Isn't it one of the goal of searXNG (https://docs.searxng.org/) ? It is a fork of searx, that started mid-2021
Oh, I had no idea it existed, I stopped using searX around that time.
I admit some instances have a design that looks MUCH better than before, but it's still not good enough for the general public, since most larger instances still use searX instead of searXNG and not all instances have a nice looking interface still.
That said, I'll give one of the instances a shot as my main search engine.
You know you can change theme in the SearX config, right?.
The default is not attractive but there are some that are very attractive.
The instances you saw with other theme just did that, change the default value without real customization, with the exception of Disroot one.
yes you can, but most instances don't use the new, nice looking theme
those that used it by default were the only ones at least, and I don't have the funds to host my own instance, which I'd certainly like to do tho
You can chance that in the configuration and will be saved for your browser.
No need to host your own.
The configuration is at user level when you load the website.
Yes, but again, not all instances have the newer theme as an option.
The newer theme I'm talking about is a newer, more modern version of the already existing
simpletheme. Most instances still use the older version of it, that looks terrible in comparison.You said, "Still needs better UX/UI if it ever wants to get close to being used by average folk" in the beginning.
I always was replying to that. Now you speak about a "specific" theme.
And that is explained in these sentences:
"The default is not attractive but there are some that are very attractive.
The instances you saw with other theme just did that, change the default value without real customization, with the exception of Disroot one."
I don't get your point to not use searX because of the lack of good UI.
And that's precisely why most people will be turned off by it. I'm not saying that we shouldn't use it because of a lack of a good UI, I'm saying that recommending it to people while it doesn't offer a good default experience for the average user is certain to end in either confusion or disappointment for those people, which will probably end back to Google or DDG after giving it a shot and finding it ugly to look at.
The worst part is the work is all there. The new simple theme looks amazing, it just needs to be the default for most instances and maybe having a better logo and that's it. That's all you need.
searX is that good.
What I am trying to show you is about what are you talking about.
We started with several themes in the discussion, then you changed to one.
Now, about this last one, the default I tell you is the raw default and not the default by most instances, which have changed.
doesn't that also not solve the problem if the search engines it is searching are manipulating results?
MetaGer is what I use.