I've lately been playing a bit with a self-hosted instance of SearXNG, an utterly-unpronounceable privacy-respecting open-source metasearch engine.

=> https://github.com/searxng/searxng SearXNG on GitHub
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasearch_engine Metasearch engine on Wikipedia

Rather than maintaining its own index or running its own crawlers (as something like YaCy does), SearXNG simply asks other engines for their results to a given query (remember Dogpile from back in the day?). The really cool thing with SearXNG is that it also gives you, the user, a whole lot of control over what engines it uses to create its aggregated results.

=> https://yacy.net/ YaCy homepage
=> /res/2024-02-21-searxng-prefs.png Image: SearXNG Preferences page listing some of the available search engines

It's pretty neat, and the results so far have been fairly decent. If you'd like to give it a try, my instance is at grep.vpota.to. (At least until I get bored with it.)

=> https://grep.vpota.to/ SearXNG on grep.vim.wtf