It was 4get.ca , thank you for your help.
Though after knowing sites developers think its good idea to put facist’s face there, i wonder if its trustworthy searching site afterall. Also, it wasnt search engine but kind of collection of scrapers from bunch of engines so more a kin to search site or something.
Some time ago I came across some comment in lemmy that suggested a search engine that doesn’t do the usual bullshit others do and doesn’t track you.
I tried it and it seemed pretty good. It didnt filter or manage what it showed you, it just searched and gave you the list like search engines used to do.
I set it up as my homepage so i can use it easily as another search, but now my browsers homepage has been reset and i didn’t have it saved anywhere else. So, i’m asking here if any of you know what this search engine was called. I already tried searching lemmy for the comment, but all i have to go on is “search engine”. If I cant find it by asking here, i dont think i’m finding it again at all.
Here is what i remember about it:
-
address was quite short, just one word or couple of combined letters.
-
every now and then you had to do “intelligence test” (site literally called it that) to deter bots and maybe to slow down the searches. Site likely couldnt handle huge amounts of traffic. It was custom captcha where you have to select which pictures are minecraft related or which pictures have some anime girl or something like that. It never had any of the usual captcha pictures like spot the firehydrant or other stuff like that. It was pretty good captcha too, pictures werent obvious but clear enough once you took a moment to look at them.
-
mainpage had meme like picture. Occasionally somewhat nsfw picture. Maybe it was just for fun or maybe to deter crawlers. Picture was somewhat related to the website itself
[ pic ]
----search-----
kind of like that. There was nothing else on the mainpage that i remember.
- it didnt have any monetisation or anything like that. It was clearly some small group’s/singular persons project and they definitely didnt like the cookiecutter searchengines we have to suffer with.
-mainpage also had kind of “old internet” look. Just the search field and on top of that some random picture in sharp box.
It was not:
- anything russia related -anything ai related
- bing
- kagi
- yacy
- ask.com
- searx
- brave
- ecosia
- mojeek
- duckduckgo
- marginalia
- startpage
- giburu
- yippy
- qwant
Sorry to say this, but the search engine that fits your 4 bullet points the best is Bing.
it was custom made captcha. It was literally called intelligence test in slightly insulting fashion. It was definitely not in anyway corporation affiliated website. The pictures on mainsite were random meme like pictures in a box above the search field.
I really hope that one commenter isnt literally only one in lemmy who knows about it.
Sounds like some small, private website that simply had any search engine’s input field embedded.
yea, it was likely some quite small website. But results it displayed was… not necessarily really good but it didnt use any of the big search engines, when i compared the results with same search words it was different enough to be potentially useful as alternative search if some bigger engine seemed to not want to show something, be it censorship, search engine optimization fuckery or something else.
You know, usually that difference simply comes from using a search engine directly (so it can store cookies and know your IP address and country) vs. using it via proxy website, where it doesn’t know anything about you.
yeah, it might be that too. But that could also be useful.
I started to down vote you, but with the verification stuff Bing does make sense.
Kagi doesn’t do that
Bing is also the only search engine I know that plasters their site with images.