this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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What the fuck are we supposed to do when the services we use are monopolies which actively seeks to destroy its competition as well as enshittify itself to a point its unusable :|
Time to start self hosting.
There is simply no usable self-hosted search engine. There are some projects like Yacy or Searxng, but they do not have their own index. And having your own self-hosted index is kind of impossible because you need to save the whole of the web on your own devices to be able to search it.
Yacy does have its own index it even allows you to crawl the webpages yourself from the settings page problem is that the results you get out of it fucking suck
I really like the concept of yacy just wish the results were better but I think there is value in p2p search indexes yacy is probably the most reasonable search engine to self host since you don't have to index everything yourself
I have had some success with https://marginalia-search.com/
Which does have its own index it is open source so you could theoretically self host but you would need to make your own index
Yeah, that's a problem. So even if you want to search your local newspaper, you won't be able to because of bot protection. Your crawler will be blocked. You also can't put the whole of Reddit or even Lemmy in your search index.
I do think this is one of the places where yacy has it's strength since yacy is p2p you can retrieve results from other nodes that have indexed the page thus large websites can be collectively indexed by many nodes.
I also don't remember having problems with the crawler getting blocked but I also didn't do a lot of crawls I can see this being a problem though.
And pirate. Steal anything they try and sell to you
Point of order, if you mean pirate as in infringe copyright, that isn't stealing.
I mean get a group of friends together and start pillaging Target stores.
The time was 10 years ago.
And the next best time is now. Kinda like planting trees.
ten year ago there were still things we could have done to stop google. now is too late...
Try not to give up hope! People said similar things about IBM, Yahoo!, AltaVista, AOL, Blockbuster Video, Standard Oil, The Dutch East India Company, and more! All of those are either in the dustbin of history or ghosts of their former selves.
The reckoning will come to these companies that continue to seem successful in spite of providing objectively bad and worsening products; nothing has ever stopped the pendulum from swinging. When you see your chance to help, give it a push.
These entities may have gone but their ghosts never left. They only got up ended because of paradigm shifts, not because the system that allowed them to exist got fixed. The new stuff that replaced the old ones eventually goes on the same path. I am not hopeful anything ever will happen.
While that's true for some of those, you never know when there will be a paradigm shift, and neither do they. Also, off the top of my head, I know that Yahoo! and IBM caused their own undoing through long periods of mismanagement. The world was in their hands and they couldn't stay out of their own way. Standard Oil was broken up in direct response to the establishment and enforcement of federal anti-monopoly regulation.
So, again, don't give up hope! If the pendulum does not swing back the other way, it will the defy the sum of all human history. If you think about it, believing otherwise doesn't even make sense, like believing if I keep throwing a ball on the air, eventually it will stay up there.