I found that no general purpose search engine will ever serve my needs. Their goal is to index the entire internet (or a very large subset of it), and sadly, a very large part of the internet is garbage I have no desire to see. So I simply stopped using search engines. I have a carefully curated, topical list of links from where I can look up information from, RSS feeds, and those pretty much cover all what I used search for.

Lately, I have been experimenting with YaCy, and fed it my list of links to index. Effectively, I now have a personal search engine. If I come across anything interesting via my RSS feeds, or via the Fediverse, I plug it into YaCy, and now its part of my search library. There’s no junk, no ads, no AI, no spam, and the search result quality is stellar. The downside is, of course, that I have to self-host YaCy, and maintain a good quality index. It takes a lot of effort to start, but once there’s a good index, it works great. So far, I found the effort/benefit ratio to be very much worth it.

I still have a SearxNG instance (which also searches my YaCy instance too, with higher weight than other sources) to fall back to if I need to, but I didn’t need to do that in the past two months, and only two times in the past six.