I use Duckduckgo, but I realised these big(ish) search engines give me all the commercialised results. Duckduckgo has been going down the slope for years, but not at such a rate as Google or Bing has.
I want to have a search engine that gives me all the small blogs and personal sites.
Does something like this exist?
Try this engine
https://search.marginalia.nu/
Or a SearXNG instance
https://search.disroot.org/search
You may also be interested in the Indie Web movement. This site is a great resource for it, with yet more links to indie sites and blogs.
Finally, not quite what you asked but here’s a freebie, in case you didn’t know about it:
https://wiby.me/
It’s an old web search engine. It only indexes pages from the 00s and earlier.
Ah Marginalia is absolutely awesome! I feel like modern search is almost an extension of website names now, so if I want to find netflix but don’t know it’s website, I might search for “netflix”. Marginalia is actually a cool way to find new stuff- like you can search “bike maintenance” and find cool blog posts about that topic.
I honestly can’t remember if that’s something google and the like used to do, but doesn’t now, or if they never did. Either way, I love it!
This is how Google started out, until like 2010-2015 it was wonderful. I think it’s just losing the seo slop arms race now tbh
Aside from SearXNG, I didn’t know about these search engines until your recommendation. Thanks to Wiby and Marginalia, I found old rich content (old BBS list conversations, for example) that I was looking for, regarding studies on the occult and esotericism. Thank you so much!