Best alternative search engine option that actually works?

Thanks, I am positively surprised how it’s going for me. Especially considering I’m actually a single developer trying to do it.

There are many reasons why it’s hard.

Currently, I work with the philosophy that for a good web search engine you need 2 things

1. Large index
2. Great ranking

For the index there are hurtles as how are you possibly able to keep up with the Internet’s growing content? Where are you going to store it? You are a small web search engine so you look to websites as a regular bot with possibly harmful intentions and so usually Cloudflare blocks you. Or social media as X, Instagram… don’t let you in too.

Even Brave search

Brave Search

Brave Search

Search the Web. Privately. Truly useful results, AI-powered answers, & more. All from an independent index. No profiling, no bias, no Big Tech.

which is arguably a big player in the search engine market

It’s also pretty standard practice to learn on Google results. It makes the search engines work in a pretty similar way, even when they are each independent. I haven’t yet done it for PriEco, am more careful

Ranking : It looks to me like solved problem. There is overwhelming amount of theory on how to do it. But someone has to learn it, understand it and integrate it to the search engine. Shouldn’t be a problem for a Brave size company. It is issue for very small individuals like me.

But there are also unexpected positive surprises. There are free, public online data sets of pre-crawled web pages. Huge ones. I was able to shrink each web page and data around it so that I can store so many on very limited hardware and still search on them in 0.4-2s. There are so many materials on how to do the ranking. And more helps for a lot of parts of the development

Google exists for a long time and they shaped the web to their image. It’s the easiest for them to keep up with the information. + They know the users personally so they know what to show to you. + They are $4.6T company