i was wondering what would it take to make a free/open/noncommercial search solution maintained by a collective (like wikipedia or something). search is too important to be ruined for everyone by corporations.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

For the past few years, a growing number of users, analysts, and experts raised alarms about a truth that feels obvious to a lot of people who surf around in web browsers: the quality of Google results is in serious decline.

That’s according to a new study by a team of researchers from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, first reported by 404 Media Tuesday.

According to the study, those efforts aren’t working, but “search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam.” These changes often lead to a “temporary positive effect,” but the spammers just find new loopholes.

Just last week, Gizmodo covered a bizarre situation that saw Google turning up what looked like a child’s homework assignment for a search about former president John F. Kennedy’s stance on the death penalty.

It’s gotten so hard to find authentic, useful results that people have started adding the word “Reddit” to search terms to turn up content written by someone who actually cares, instead of someone just trying to make money.

In 2023, a Gizmodo investigation found the tech news outlet CNET deleted thousands of articles because its team felt that would aid in the site’s performance on Google Search.

The original article contains 1,257 words, the summary contains 211 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

For most of my usual search any search engine does the job. For the rest :

https://fmhy.pages.dev/

Ecosia is pretty sweet if you fancy helping the planet. It’s also privacy conscious as in does not sell or store any personally identifiable information. They also anonymize search data.

important to note that Ecosia does collect some non-personal information, such as search terms and click data, to improve search results and analyze usage patterns.

My problem seems to stem from the fact that my searches are often obscure and commercial interests probably wish I was searching for something else.

I don’t need a study to know that.

I switched to DuckDuckGo years ago, never looked back

By coincidence, yesterday I had to use my Virtual windows machine to test some windows software with a a scanner (my own machine is Linux). So i go to the browser in there, search for the brand and model for the driver and lo and behold, all the results were sponsored or incorrect. Correct the browser configuration to DuckDuckGo, retry, and there is the first result!

Now I know, DuckDuckGo is now apparently just Microsoft Bing, and I hate Microsoft, but at least this works. I know that DuckDuckGo is also getting worse and I’m about to look into self hosted open source alternatives, see what that gets me…