No, actually.

SearX/SearXNG is a free and open source, highly customizable, and self-hostable meta search engine. SearX instances act as a middle man, they query other search engines for you, stripping all their spyware ad crap and never having your connection touch their servers. Of course you have to trust the SearX instance host with your query information, but again if you are that paranoid just self host.

I personally also trust some foss loving sysadmin that host social services for free out of alturism, who also accepts hosting donations, with my info over Google/Alphabet any day.

Heres a list of all public searx instances, I personally prefer to use paulgo.io All SearX instances are configured different to index different engines. If one doesn’t seem to give good results try a few others.

Did I mention it has bangs like duckduckgo? If you really need google like for maps and buisness info just use !!g in the query

search.marginalia.nu is a completely novel search engine written and hosted by one dude that aims to prioritize indexing lighter websites little to no javascript as these tend to be personal websites and homepages that have poor SEO and the big search engines won’t index well. If you remember the internet of the early 2000s and want a nostalgia trip this ones for you

Finally, YaCy is another completely novel search engine that uses p2p technology to power a big webcrawler which prioritizes indexes based off user queries and feedback. Everyone can download yacy and devote a bit of their computing power to help out a collective search engine. Companies can also download yacy and use it to index their private intranets. They have a public instance available through a web portal. Its not a great search engine for what most people want, which is quick and relevant information within the first few clicks. But it is an interesting use of technology and what a true honest-to-god community-operated search engine would look like untainted by SEO scores.

I hope this has been informative to those who believe theres only a few options to pick from, I hate to be the ‘bhut achthually’ guy but know these options are so unknown to most people.

For now. Soon enough there will be ads and so on in the name if increasing profits.