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New article (draft): search engines
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Rohan Kumar
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---
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date: "2021-03-10T12:51:06-08:00"
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draft: true
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outputs:
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- html
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- gemtext
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tags:
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- web
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footnote_heading: Notes
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title: A look at search engines with their own indexes
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---
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DRAFT POST: this post is in progress/under review on envs.net and will be posted on my main site, [seirdy.one](https://seirdy.one/) when it's ready. Don't share it yet.
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This is a cursory review of all the indexing search engines I have been able to find.
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The three dominant English search engines with their own indexes[^1] are Google, Bing, and Yandex (<abbr title="Google, Bing, Yandex">GBY</abbr>). Many alternatives to GBY exist, but almost none of them have their own results; instead, they just source their results from GBY.
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With that in mind, I decided to test and catalog all the different indexing search engines I could find. I prioritized breadth over depth, and encourage readers to try the engines out themselves if they'd like more information.
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I primarily evaluated English-speaking search engines because that's my primary language. With some difficulty, I could probably evaluate a Spanish one; however, I wasn't able to find any Spanish-language engines powered by their own crawlers.
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This page is a "living document" that I plan on updating indefinitely. Check for updates once in a while if you find this page interesting. Feel free to send me suggestions, updates, and corrections; I'd especially appreciate help from those who speak languages besides English and can evaluate a non-English indexing search engine. Contact info is in the article footer.
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Methodology
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-----------
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I mainly evaluated link results, and didn't focus too much on (often glaring) privacy issues, "enhanced" or "instant" results (e.g. Wikipedia sidebars, related searches, StackExchange answers), or other elements.
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I compared results for esoteric queries side-by-side; if the first 20 results were (nearly) identical to another engine's results (though perhaps in a slightly different order), they were likely sourced externally and not from an independent index.
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I tried to pick queries that should have a good number of results and show variance between search engines. An incomplete selection of queries I tested:
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- "vim", "emacs", "neovim", and "nvimrc": Search engines with relevant results for "nvimrc" typically have a big index. Finding relevant results for the text editors "vim" and "emacs" instead of other topics that share the name is a challenging task.
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- "vim cleaner": should return results related to a [line of cleaning products](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_%28cleaning_product%29) rather than the Correct Text Editor.
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- "Seirdy": My site is relatively low-traffic, but my nickname is pretty unique and visible on several of the highest-traffic sites out there.
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- "Project London": a small movie made with volunteers and FLOSS without much advertising. If links related to the movie show up, the engine's really good.
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- "oppenheimer": a name that could refer to many things. Without context, it should refer to the physicist who worked on the atomic bomb in Los Alamos. Other historical queries: "magna carta" (intermediate), "the prince" (very hard).
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General indexing search-engines
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-------------------------------
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### Large indexes, good results
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These are large engines that pass all the above tests and more.
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- Google: the biggest index. Allows submitting pages and sitemaps for crawling, but requires login. Powers a few other engines:
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- Startpage
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- Runaroo
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- SAPO (Portuguese interface, can work with English results)
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- Bing: the runner-up. Allows submitting pages and sitemaps for crawling, but requires login. Its index powers many other engines:
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- Yahoo
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- DuckDuckGo[^2]
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- AOL
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- Qwant[^3]
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- Ecosia
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- Ekoru
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- Privado
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- Findx
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- Disconnect Search[^4]
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- PrivacyWall
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- Lilo
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- SearchScene
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- Peekier
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- Oscobo
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- Million Short
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- Yippy search[^5]
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- Lycos
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- Givero
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- Swisscows
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- Ask.moe[^6]
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- Partially powers MetaGer by default; this can be turned off
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- At this point, I stopped adding Bing-based search engines. There are just too many.
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- Yandex: originally a Russian search engine, it now has an English version. Some Russian results bleed into its English site. Allows submitting pages and sitemaps for crawling, but requires login. Powers:
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- Epic Search
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- Occasionally powers DuckDuckGo's link results instead of Bing.
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- Mojeek: Claims to be privacy-oriented. Quality isn't at Google/Bing/Yandex's level, but it's not bad either. If I had to use Mojeek as my default general search engine, I'd live.
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- Petal search: [gopetal.com](https://www.gopetal.com/) and [petalsearch.com](https://petalsearch.com/). A very new engine developed by Huawei. Surprisingly good results; it passed all the listed tests. Requires an account to submit sites. I discovered this via my access logs.
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### Smaller indexes, relevant results
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These engines pass most of the tests listed in the "methodology" section.
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- [Right Dao](https://rightdao.com): very fast, good results. Passes the tests fairly well.
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- [Gigablast](http://gigablast.com/): It's been around for a while and also sports a classic web directory. Searches are a bit slow, and it charges to submit sites for crawling. It powers [Private.sh](https://private.sh). Gigablast is tied with Right Dao for quality.
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- [Gowiki](https://gowiki.com): Very young, small index, but shows promise. I discovered this in the seirdy.one access logs.
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### Smaller indexes, hit-and-miss
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These engines fail badly at a few important tests.
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- [seekport](http://www.seekport.com/): The interface is in German but it supports searching in English just fine. The default language is selected by your locale. It's really good considering its small index; it hasn't heard of less common terms (e.g. "Seirdy"), but it's able to find relevant results in other tests.
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- [Exalead](http://www.exalead.com/search/): slow, quality is hit-and-miss. Its indexer claims to crawl the DMOZ directory, which has since shut down and been replaced by the [Curlie](https://curlie.org) directory. No relevant results for "Oppenheimer" and some other history-related queries. Allows submitting individual URLs for indexing, but requires solving a Google reCAPTCHA and entering an email address.
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- [wbsrch](https://wbsrch.com/): In addition to its generalist search, it also has many other utilities related to domain name statistics. Failed multiple tests. Its index is a bit dated; it has an old backlog of sites it hasn't finished indexing.
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- [ExactSeek](https://www.exactseek.com/): small index, disproportionately dominated by big sites. Failed multiple tests. Allows submitting individual URLs for crawling, but requires entering an email address and receiving a newsletter. Webmaster tools seem to heavily push for paid SEO options.
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### Unusable engines, irrelevant results
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Results from these search engines don't seem at all useful.
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- YaCy: community-made index; slow. Results are awful/irrelevant, but can be useful for intranet or custom search.
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- Scopia: only seems to be available via the [MetaGer](https://metager.org) metasearch engine after turning off Bing and news results. Tiny index, very low-quality.
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- [Active Search Results](https://www.activesearchresults.com): very poor quality
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- Crawlson: young, slow. In this category because its index has a cap of 10 urls per domain. I initially discovered Crawlson in the seirdy.one access logs. The site seems to be down right now, so I didn't link it.
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Non-generalist search
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---------------------
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These indexing search engines don't have a Google-like "ask me anything" endgame; they're trying to do something different.
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- Wiby: [wiby.me](https://wiby.me) and [wiby.org](https://wiby.org): I love this one. It focuses on smaller independent sites that capture the spirit of the "early" web. It's more focused on "discovering" new interesting pages that match a set of keywords than finding a specific resources. I like to think of Wiby as an engine for surfing, not searching. Runaroo occasionally features a hit from Wiby. If you have a small site or blog that isn't very "commercial", consider submitting it to the index.
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- [Quor](https://www.quor.com): seems to mainly index large news sites.
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Other languages
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---------------
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I'm unable to evaluate these engines properly since I don't speak the necessary languages. English searches on these are a hit-or-miss. I might have made a few mistakes in this category.
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### Big indexes
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- Baidu: Chinese
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- Qihoo 360: Chinese. I'm not sure how independent this one is.
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- Sogou: Chinese
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- Yisou: Chinese
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- [Naver](https://search.naver.com): Korean.
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- [Seznam](https://www.seznam.cz/): Czech, seems relatively privacy-friendly. Discovered in the seirdy.one access logs.
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- [Cốc Cốc](https://coccoc.com/search): Vietnamese
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### Smaller indexes
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- [Parsijoo](http://www.parsijoo.ir/): Persian
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- [search.ch](https://search.ch): Regional search engine for Switzerland; users can restrict searches to their local regions.
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- [fastbot](https://www.fastbot.de/): German
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- [Moose.at](https://www.moose.at): German (Austria-based)
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Misc
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----
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- Ask.com: the main site shut down, but subdomains like [uk.ask.com](https://uk.ask.com) are still alive. They claim to outsource search results. The results seem similar to Google, Bing, and Yandex; however, I can't pinpoint exactly where their results are coming from.
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- Not evaluated: Apple's search. It's only accessible through a search widget in iOS and macOS and shows very few results. This might change; see the next section.
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- Partially evaluated: [Infinity Search](https://infinitysearch.co): young, small index. It recently split into a paid offering with the main index and [Infinity Decentralized](https://infinitydecentralized.com/), the latter of which allows users to select from community-hosted crawlers. I managed to try it out before it became a paid offering, and it seemed decent; however, I wasn't able to run the tests listed in the "Methodology" section. Allows submitting URLs and sitemaps into a text box, no other work required.
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Upcoming engines
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----------------
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These engines aren't ready yet; their indexes are either in a proof-of-concept phase with a handful of sites, or aren't available yet.
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- Apple: given the activity of the AppleBot crawler lately, their index will almost certainly grow to a size large enough to power a general search engine soon. Check your server's access logs; there's a good chance it's crawled your site if you have a few backlinks.
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- Brave [announced](https://brave.com/search/) that it will start its own independent search engine based on the now-discontinued Cliqz. I don't endorse the company, but I hope its results will be available through metasearch engines like Searx.
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Acknowledgements
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----------------
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Some of this content came from the [Search Engine Map](https://www.searchenginemap.com/) and [Search Engine Party](https://searchengine.party/). A few web directories also proved useful.
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[^1]: Yes, "indexes" is an acceptable plural form of the word "index". The word "indices" sounds weird to me outside a math class.
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[^2]: DuckDuckGo has a crawler called DuckDuckBot. This crawler doesn't impact the linked results displayed; it just grabs favicons and scrapes data for a few instant answers
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[^3]: Qwant claims to also use its own crawler for results, but it's still mostly Bing. Try a side-by-side comparison; I found that it doesn't seem to have anything besides Bing results.
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[^4]: Disconnect Search allows users to have results proxied from Bing or Yahoo, but Yahoo sources its results from Bing.
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[^5]: Yippy claims to be powered by a certain IBM brand (a brand that could correspond to any number of products) and annotates results with the phrase "Yippy Index", but a side-by-side comparison with Bing and other Bing-based engines revealed results to be nearly identical.
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[^6]: Ask.moe was working on a [FLOSS indexer](https://git.sr.ht/~danskeren/spider.moe); its search page stated an intention to switch to it from Bing at one point. This statement has since been removed.
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