"I found it very weird that there essentially is no way to browse the web in an open manner. So that's what I am trying to build," the founder of Stract said.
"I found it very weird that there essentially is no way to browse the web in an open manner. So that's what I am trying to build," the founder of Stract said.
Tbh I just saw it needed a login and scrolled back up to the link without reading further, so was obviously a bit hasty in my assessment of it being a paywall.
For anyone wondering about how they'll eventually address financial sustainability if Stract takes off:
Stract is currently not monetized in any way, but its website says it will eventually have contextual ads tied to specific search terms but that it will not track its users, which is similar to the system DuckDuckGo uses. Stract also plans on offering ad-free searches to paying subscribers.
I'd pay for independent, non meta, ad-free search. I bet a more straightforward approach is more energy efficient as well. In the meanwhile the big tech are running a gazillion processes on our data to suck every bit of wealth they can out of our existence through their free (in it's littlest sense) products.
I will say I'm pretty glad to see a search engine which actually is not just a meta search engine. I wish Kagi would attempt this rather than partnerning with Brave.
One thing I find odd though is why these engines trying to make their own index don't do the adversarial strategy that Brave Search has done : while using other indexes, collect what people actually click on and use it in your own index. I will note that I do not support Brave.
What I still can't figure out (in my very shallow dive into the repo) is if it's a meta search engine like Searx-ng or if it does its own crawling and builds its own search index.
I run Searx-ng and love it, but I'd be interested in a true self-hosted search (though I'd need to devote a lot of resources to build and run such an index).
Anyone know?
Update: Looks like it crawls and maintains its own index. From the credits/thanks at the bottom of the readme (emphases mine):
The commoncrawl organization for crawling the web and making the dataset readily available. Even though we have our own crawler now, commoncrawl has been a huge help in the early stages of development.
#YaCy is an open source crawler that you can run and feed Searx with. I recall some searx instances that run their own YaCy. YaCy can also share indexes with other YaCy instances.
They're fully within their rights to restrict access to their content, just as everyone complaining is fully within their rights to not give up their email to access content.
I realize independent media financing is a huge struggle right now, and the quality of journalism has been in a downwards spiral for decades now. Clearly, the current system is unsustainable, I agree with 404media on that much. I wholeheartedly disagree with restricting access to information as a solution, as that seems completely opposed to what journalism should aim to achieve.
For most of its history, journalism has been locked behind a paywall. I think it's a bit disingeneous to claim that this principle is against the idea of journalism. Journalism and especially good journalism is expensive - under a capitalist system, it's entirely normal to ask for your work to be valued through monetary means.
That said, I'm most annoyed because no one is actually talking about Stract, just about how 404media decided to lock the article.
Yeah, that's an automatic no for me on all of their articles. I hope they eventually see posts like this and realize they're shooting themselves in the foot.
This seems cool, and it's nice to see people creating alternatives to google, but I probably won't end up using it.
Over the past few months I've tried both DuckDuckGo and Kagi. Both are decent for a lot of things, and Kagi has some really nice features, but in practice they've just taught me that I actually want my search engine to know a bit about me.
If I'm looking for something in the area on a google search, I can literally just search the thing. Google already knows where I am and knows what context I'm probably looking for, so it gets me to important results faster. While that might not be particularly useful for areas where Kagi's tools shine (like research), it turns out that a ton of my searches are just basic stuff like looking for store hours and phone numbers. In both cases I found myself getting frustrated with not having google as my default, requiring a bunch of extra typing or a manual switch of search engines.
I'd love to get a viable replacement for google, but realizing how much my searching benefits from their massive pile of data on me, I don't know that I'll actually find one without that. It is nice to have an alternative if results get too personalized or if I want to check against like a baseline search, but search is the one place I've tried to get away from google that I keep going back.
I definitely am glad I got away from them for email and document storage, though.
It's the predicament between choosing convenience or privacy. Apart from local businesses, what other searches have you found are improved by them having your data? For me, it's money exchange rates.
(What alternatives do you use for email and storage, though?)
Searches that require some context are often a lot easier to find. Like, if I'm searching for something D&D related, I rarely have to specify that that's what I'm looking for. If it's on wikidot, it'll come up right away. Even for pretty generic words like 'web' or 'death', it knows I'm looking for the spell on the one hand and the cleric domain on the other, just because I've searched for so much D&D stuff and done so over and over again.
For mail I use Proton, for backup I use iDrive. I'm pretty happy with both.
Stract and SearXNG are two entirely different projects. SearXNG is just using other search engines to power itself - it's known as a meta search engine. Stract has its own index that does not use other search engines to power itself.
I find the amount of engineers who have built an "alternative to google on their spare time" truly fascinating. Because if you think that is possible, IMO, you have no idea what Google actually built.
Its just not a search engine, and also, as a search engine, it stopped being a good model to follow a decade ago.
Build on the ideas and build something new instead