Previously I was looking for search engine that turned out it wasnt worth remembering afterall. As people helped, i thought its easier to just list every site its not. The site I was looking for turned out to be maintained by some rightwing assholes, but I thought maybe it could still be useful as it collects scrapers from many engines into one site. But since it apparently blocks lqbt domains, its basically worthless since who knows what else it blocks. Apparently anything those fucks touch is tainted.
I tried describing the site based on what I remembered and how it appeared to me. now it feels shameful even leaving it as context. The picture gets conveyed through the comments anyway for those interested.
I’m sorry it ended up like this, I should probably have done this much eariler and not give the site any benefit of the doubt.
So, instead lets make this into list of search engines so this post might have at least something positive about it. I already started gathering the list earlier as by product of the unfortunate search. It might be better to just scrap this all and start with new post but it would also erase what happened and the lesson learned.
I know there are lists already, but I dont think they all have every engine, especially smaller or newer ones. We could also gather information about engines’ maintainers, stuff that helps determine what to expect from them. I’ll try gathering it here on this post from the comments and if I find something myself.
Lets avoid all ai searchers since those ought to be in their own category anyway.
List of search engines
- bing
- kagi
- yacy
- ask.com
- searx
- brave
- ecosia
- mojeek
- duckduckgo
- marginalia
- startpage
- giburu
- yippy
- qwant
Commonly recommended ones are Kagi, SearX, and Brave. Any of those ones what you are looking for? I’ve never used any of them myself, so can’t say if they meet your criteria or not
no, it wasnt any of the common ones. I doubt it would be on any list like that, it seemed really niche
4get.ca maybe?
it is 4get.ca for sure, which for some reason when I loaded it contains an image of superfascist Julius Evola as its meme like picture
That sounds… concerning… I dont know people like that by face or name so this is good to know.
Now i wonder if it was that good search engine afterall if they thought that was good idea. It doesnt seem to push anything malign when i searched lqbt as test, but after knowing what you told I dont feel like I can fully trust the site anyway.
it’s a meta of some kind, like SearXNG; you can edit the way in which that works but… who knows? I hadn’t seen this image on it before today.
yes! that was it! thank you!
Might it still be in your browser history somewhere?
i wish, it has been destroyed multiple times by accident.
A while ago I set up firefox to delete stuff like cache and temporary files on exit, yet it switched it to everything at some point. On top of that, I used sync to save some of the stuff i have there and of course it saved the misadjusted settings there and wiped the history every time i logged in. I noticed it was sync doing it only the second time it happened and ironically i tried using sync to save the history data. I was quite desperate when i noticed this had happened and tried even system restore, file restore to firefox profile and other files in case it might revert it, but the damage had been done who knows how long ago, so there was nothing to be done. Even on the first time I lost years of data :(
I have been on lemmy for about 2 years and my current history goes only 4/7/2024. The comment i read must be older than that but not older than 2 years. I wish i had bookmarked it.
Holy moly! I wish you luck in your quest. Please let us know if you figure it out. Every engine I was going to suggest has already been mentioned by others.
my only hope at this point is someone in lemmy knowing about it, so you all will know about it at same time as me if that person replys to this post. At least maybe this post might become useful as list of search engines by process of elimination :D
I tried browsing through lemmy with searchword “search engine”, but it think the comment was relatively short like “you should try xyz” or something like that. On top of that it was reply to someone elses message.
Hey, someone found the engine i was looking for. It was 4get. Though it was also revealed that the site is run by people who think its good idea to put facist’s face as memepicture there.
Thank you for updating me, what a rollercoaster this post was! I’ll definitely check it out (superficially at least), the fascist part is a bit disconcerting.
Yeah, though now the sites name makes sense. Must be made by someone who uses 4chan.
@reksas @CuddlyCassowary About page says: https://search.mint.lgbt/about
“This is a metasearch engine that gets results from other engines, and strips away all of the tracking parameters and Microsoft/globohomo bullshit they add.”
and instances page disallows finding out (it seems) only lgbt domain easily by clicking: see https://4get.ca/instances?target=web&s=avisynth+super+res&scraper=google&nsfw=yes
Yeah, I think this guy hates lgbt.
Look, I didnt remember it was like that, but i understand that how i described it looks quite bad after the fact. If it does that then its worthless as search site as who knows what else it might remove. At this point it might be better to just delete this whole post or change it to just list every search engine everyone knows.
I regret wanting to remember that damn site now.
Did you reply to the comment that suggested the URL?
No, i saw no need since it wasnt reply to my own comment
Gibiru isn’t on your list of things it isn’t. Maybe that one?
Yippy and Qwant maybe… though not sure how many of your criteria they satisfy as I haven’t used them.
none of those, but at this point i’m also happy to add to the list. The one i’m looking for must come up eventually.
Is it kagi?
My guess is kagi
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.
Maybe YaCy?
ask.com ?
Startpage?