I’ve used Yacy por years. It’s very customizeable and gives good results, and I like that I can curate, to some degree, what it finds. Biggest drawback is that I don’t always feel like starting up a server to do a search.
Comment on Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option.
mesamunefire@lemmy.world 5 weeks agoDoes anyone use yacy?
swelter_spark@reddthat.com 5 weeks ago
AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space 5 weeks ago
I tried, years ago, I think their federated approach to building a database and crawling are cool - but at least the last time I checked, the actual search algorithm was just too bad. It often gave me completely irrelevant results and seemed very susceptible to spam sites gaming Search Engine Optimisation.
mesamunefire@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Yeah I had it crawl a site I knew was mostly unique. Left for a day and searched, nothing. I had to give it the entire url for it to pop up with anything…
Search is actually something that is kinda hard to get right. I just dont like having so many sites that are just small holes into google/microsoft/etc…search engines. I was hoping there was something out there that works.