Technology @lemmy.world kurcatovium @lemm.ee 2 wk. ago

Does anyone use https://presearch.com/

Presearch is a decentralized search engine, powered by the community.

Browsing the web I came across this (meta) search engine. From the first glance, it seems promising and giving quite a good results to my searches. Definitely better than Google, Bing or DDG, which tend to be full of SEO/ads/AI bullshit these days. Does anyone use it?

It somehow implies it's open source and indeed there is github https://github.com/PresearchOfficial too, but I can't find any link from the presearch.com itself to it. It's just... IDK, weird?

30 comments

I'm immediately suspicious of anything that says "earn crypto rewards" so that's a "no" from me.

I just use Searx-NG as my meta search engine, and it's been pretty good.

There's another self-hosted actual search engine (with its own dataset + crawler) but I forget its name off the top of my head. I've been looking into setting that up to experiment with.
- Same, anything peddling crypto and implying the user may earn it through no actual work being done, is suspicious.
  
  Searx-NG works well enough for me in 90% of cases, may not be perfect yet but if it keeps getting developed it will get better. I love those random redirectors that send you to a random instance, no centralised site you depend on then.
  
  I think the work here is sharing your search history lol
- Are you thinking of Stract? https://stract.com/
  
  I don't self host, I use it as an option in Searx.
  
  Yep! Wish I'd have seen your reply before digging though old posts to find that lol.
  
  Is that remotely feasible on a homelab? What kind of bandwidth/storage would you need to run this thing and keep it up to date?
- Yeah, that crypto part must be new(ish). I remember it definitely wasn't there about half year ago when I first find out presearch. I believe it had no account to create either.
  
  Well, I'll give SearXNG another chance I assume.
  
  Lol it was there, I used to use it during the pandemic and the earning for each search thing was def there in 2020.
  
  They might not make it as obvious anymore though
  
  Unrelated, but I've never seen someone use the word "assume" that way before. It technically works, I think?
- YaCy?
  
  There’s also another SearX-like one called websurfx - albeit still in its early days.
  
  I've heard of that one recently, but the one I was thinking of was Stract. Had to search through a few communities to find it because I'm a genius who didn't bookmark it lol.
“Earn crypto rewards” lol nah, I’m good.
Presearch make proxy call to google, they add the wall and their own tracking and their own ads. Stay away.

In fact, stay away any project that have web3 or crypto
- Yeah, if it says Crypto on it, it's a scam. Full stop.
  
  That's just not true, it's "usually" a scam. ProtonMail and Mullvad aren't scams just because they accept crypto for payments.
- That crypto part must be new, it definitely wasn't there some time ago. Anyway, glad I'm not the only one smelling something fishy in this...
  
  I‘ve tested Presearch like 2 years ago and even back then it already had these “PRE tokens” you could earn by using it and get more by gambling/betting on search terms.
I used to, until they started changing links for actual results to have trackers built in. I couldn't click on specific websites i was searching for without my adblock putting a stop to it. Asked them about it in their discord and they basically told me to turn off adblock. Dropped them like a sack of potatoes and spun up a SearXNG instance. Before that I thought about spinning up a presearch node. Glad I switched to SearXNG. It basically accomplished what I wanted from Presearch without the ads and crypto shitcoin.

If I had to switch to a new engine not run by me, I'd consider Qwant or maybe Kagi if paying for it is worth it. I'm old enough to be used to having stuff for free on the internet, doing it yourself to keep from having to pay for a service is a perfectly fine option for me.

My search engine lineage: Alta Vista

Yahoo

Dogpile

Metacrawler

Google

Cuil

Google

DDG

Google

Presearch

My own SearXNG instance
- Wow, that trackers bullshit is even worse than I thought.
  
  After all I'm glad that I asked. Something felt fishy about Presearch from the start and I couldn't pin point what exactly. Reading through all the terms and technicalities was exhausting, so this thread was nice kind of tldr.
  
  Thanks everyone.
  
  Yeah, I would-be been fine if they just added a listing that was actually an ad, but replacing actual results with no option to not click the tracking injected link was enough for me. Ignoring their shitcoin is fine, it's not required to use their search. But I don't take kindly to bullshit if it's forced on me.
- Thank you for showing me SearXNG. I will definitely be looking into it, and once comfortable maybe even host one internally.
  
  Of all the things I've self hosted, it's by far the easiest. TrueNAS scale's kubernetes chart was pretty install and run. See ya over in !selfhosted@lemmy.world
Not gonna lie, looks pretty awful.

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