@parismarx hey, I listened to the System Crash episode from May 23rd yesterday (a little bit behind on my podcasts...), where at some point you briefly talk about search engines you have been trying out, including ecosia and qwant.

Not sure, what else you have tried, so I thought maybe I just throw in two that I have experiemented with and had great success. Perhaps you already know them. But those were not mentioned in the podcast. Until the european Open Search Index is ready, there unfortunately is no perfect solution, but meta-search engines have been the best compromise for me personally until then.

Obviously you still rely on big tech to some extent, but at least you diversify the reliance a little bit. Sometimes, this also takes the form of competitive compatibility, which is a notion I really like towards big tech.

#SearX/#SearXng is of course great and extremely customizable, open source and self hostable (for trying out, here is a German provider: gruble.de).

Personally, I have been using #MetaGer (metager.de), a German meta search engine, for quite a while now. I like the minimal and brutalist-esque UI of it. For me,  it just gets the job done for me, both in my personal life and in my academic life. A little disclaimer here: MetaGer is run by a German NGO, which I joined as a passive member a few months back, because I really like their mission. They also plan to create a new search engine, entirely based on the Open Search Index, called "nolm" (no LLM), which will also find its way as a search provider into MetaGer.

I do have some little gripes with MetaGer, which I remedied with my own flimsy solution stacked on top of it, that  provides  a similar feature like DDG's "Bangs".

Anyways, thanks for the great podcast and this episode in particular, which was very entertaining.