New article (draft): search engines

2024-11-27 14:12:09 +00:00 · 2021-03-10 12:52:20 -08:00 · 2021-03-10 12:52:20 -08:00 · de8c4f1f28
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+---
+date: "2021-03-10T12:51:06-08:00"
+draft: true
+outputs:
+  - html
+  - gemtext
+tags:
+  - web
+footnote_heading: Notes
+title: A look at search engines with their own indexes
+---
+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.
+
+This is a cursory review of all the indexing search engines I have been able to find.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Methodology
+-----------
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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:
+
+- "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.
+- "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.
+- "Seirdy": My site is relatively low-traffic, but my nickname is pretty unique and visible on several of the highest-traffic sites out there.
+- "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.
+- "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).
+
+General indexing search-engines
+-------------------------------
+
+### Large indexes, good results
+
+These are large engines that pass all the above tests and more.
+
+- Google: the biggest index. Allows submitting pages and sitemaps for crawling, but requires login. Powers a few other engines:
+  - Startpage
+  - Runaroo
+  - SAPO (Portuguese interface, can work with English results)
+- Bing: the runner-up. Allows submitting pages and sitemaps for crawling, but requires login. Its index powers many other engines:
+  - Yahoo
+  - DuckDuckGo[^2]
+  - AOL
+  - Qwant[^3]
+  - Ecosia
+  - Ekoru
+  - Privado
+  - Findx
+  - Disconnect Search[^4]
+  - PrivacyWall
+  - Lilo
+  - SearchScene
+  - Peekier
+  - Oscobo
+  - Million Short
+  - Yippy search[^5]
+  - Lycos
+  - Givero
+  - Swisscows
+  - Ask.moe[^6]
+  - Partially powers MetaGer by default; this can be turned off
+  - At this point, I stopped adding Bing-based search engines. There are just too many.
+- 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:
+  - Epic Search
+  - Occasionally powers DuckDuckGo's link results instead of Bing.
+- 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.
+- 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.
+
+### Smaller indexes, relevant results
+
+These engines pass most of the tests listed in the "methodology" section.
+
+- [Right Dao](https://rightdao.com): very fast, good results. Passes the tests fairly well.
+- [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.
+- [Gowiki](https://gowiki.com): Very young, small index, but shows promise. I discovered this in the seirdy.one access logs.
+
+### Smaller indexes, hit-and-miss
+
+These engines fail badly at a few important tests.
+
+- [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.
+- [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.
+- [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.
+- [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.
+
+### Unusable engines, irrelevant results
+
+Results from these search engines don't seem at all useful.
+
+- YaCy: community-made index; slow. Results are awful/irrelevant, but can be useful for intranet or custom search.
+- 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.
+- [Active Search Results](https://www.activesearchresults.com): very poor quality
+- 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.
+
+Non-generalist search
+---------------------
+
+These indexing search engines don't have a Google-like "ask me anything" endgame; they're trying to do something different.
+
+- 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.
+- [Quor](https://www.quor.com): seems to mainly index large news sites.
+
+Other languages
+---------------
+
+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.
+
+### Big indexes
+
+- Baidu: Chinese
+- Qihoo 360: Chinese. I'm not sure how independent this one is.
+- Sogou: Chinese
+- Yisou: Chinese
+- [Naver](https://search.naver.com): Korean.
+- [Seznam](https://www.seznam.cz/): Czech, seems relatively privacy-friendly. Discovered in the seirdy.one access logs.
+- [Cốc Cốc](https://coccoc.com/search): Vietnamese
+
+### Smaller indexes
+
+- [Parsijoo](http://www.parsijoo.ir/): Persian
+- [search.ch](https://search.ch): Regional search engine for Switzerland; users can restrict searches to their local regions.
+- [fastbot](https://www.fastbot.de/): German
+- [Moose.at](https://www.moose.at): German (Austria-based)
+
+Misc
+----
+
+- 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.
+- 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.
+- 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.
+
+Upcoming engines
+----------------
+
+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.
+
+- 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.
+- 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.
+
+Acknowledgements
+----------------
+
+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.
+
+
+[^1]: Yes, "indexes" is an acceptable plural form of the word "index". The word "indices" sounds weird to me outside a math class.
+
+[^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
+
+[^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.
+
+[^4]: Disconnect Search allows users to have results proxied from Bing or Yahoo, but Yahoo sources its results from Bing.
+
+[^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.
+
+[^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.
+