Other ones worth checking out include:
- https://search.marginalia.nu/ (A non-commercial search engine)
- https://wiby.me/ (Tends to have those really weird and cool indie sites)
- https://searchmysite.net/ (An index of personal websites)
- https://indieweb-search.jamesg.blog/ (Search IndieWeb websites)
- https://millionshort.com/ (Ignore the first million results from Google)
https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...
Best guess is the bots are attempting to manipulate Google or Bing's suggestion algorithms this way (since a lot of small search engines are basically just forwarding results from bigger engines). Unfortunately they can be very aggressive to the point of almost bringing down your service. I saw up to 30k searches per hour before I cried uncle and got behind cloudflare.
I do offer an API, and I suspect some others in the indie search space might as well (or might at least be willing to set one up). That way I can rate limit on a per-consumer basis without affecting everyone.
eTools is a metasearch engine that uses commercial APIs for its search providers, so it does not get blocked. However, each search is a bit expensive for eTools, so users might get blocked by eTools instead.
IMO, Kagi and Brave search are the two best alternative general search engines right now.
Runnaroo was pretty good as well ;-)
Kagi uses a mix of Teclis and other engines (claims to use Bing and Google) but the ability to adjust ranking yourself is its wild card. Neeva is similar, combining its own index with some ability to influence ranking.
But personally, I'm trying to reduce my use of "one engine to rule them all" and instead use specific engines for specific tasks they're good at.
When I say "Best"for a general search engine, my definition is that it would fulfill the needs of myself and my non-technical family members. Kagi and Brave Search both do that while being different enough to not be just another Bing clone. I use Mojeek often, think it is great, and having their own index is a tremendous asset, but it doesn't quite meet that full definition yet.
It shouldn't be that hard to find the bad network if you're systematically investigating all the time. Google has people testing search results often.
The problem is that this is fairly expensive. But quite possibly not the largest cost a search engine would have.