Metager.de ?
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Hey guys,
Anyone uses metager.de ?
I found out about this one recently, apparently it's free software and they provide a proxy for websites too.
I couldn't find any other websites that run their software (unlike Searx) but maybe only because they are not very well known? Here in the forum a search only returns one single result.
If you want to try it in english, just write metager.de/en
If anyone uses it and would share their experiences with it I would love to hear from you :) Thanks!
If not, at least now you know one more search engine running Free Software :)
> If you want to try it in english, just write metager.de/en
From Wikipedia I just found there's also metager.net (which redirects to metager.org and shows english by default)
:)
Thanks for your comment, Wikipedia article has some interesting information. I didn't know they had an Onion service.
So, being Free Software, available for Tor users, ran by what appears to be a NonProfit with privacy in mind... how come no one talks about using it as main search engine? :)
I have been using metager.de/en for a couple of months. It is my first choice. It is still under development though. The proxy links don't work yet as far as I know.
I first learned of it from prism-break.org
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I sometimes used it at least ten years ago. I think it will always be "under development", I think they had a beta and a Metager2.
Whenever I used Metager back in the days, it wouldn't handle non-alphabetic scripts. I didn't find anything that impressed me. I remember it was built to be a highly customizable metasearch with lots of checkboxes (such as which engines to exclude, with several presets offered I think).
More recently, when I had long given up on Metager for searches, they started a nice OSM-based Maps site with a good pedestrian and bicycle routing (Germany only?) at https://maps.metager.de/map or https://maps.metager.de/, at a time when I struggled to get the regular OSM website's routing to work for me. And, even better, they had the proxy links you mentioned, which at that time still worked. The proxy URLs had very transparent syntax (but were framed in an outer part whose URL didn't), so you were able to use their proxy service on its own, without performing a search in between.
>The proxy links don't work yet as far as I know.
I think the "yet" is wrong, they no longer work (see above). I remember they stopped working several years ago, so if they don't work now, it probably means they haven't worked in the meantime, and never again will, yet are still given in search results.
I'm still looking for a web search that fulfills these criteria:
- It has a decent privacy record, no business model based on selling search data.
- When I use quotation marks, it will not give me any results that ignore them. For example, "foo bar" fnord should only give results containing both foo bar and fnord, I think Searx fails here.
- It can fully handle Unicode, it doesn't break up words into their constituent characters.
- It will not give me totally different top results for the exact same search.
- It will not include results that are merely "similar", or at least it should offer documented syntax to control whether "similar" results should be included.
- Ideally, it can handle more than one or two items.
- Ideally, syntax should be documented, it's useless if only the people who made it know how to use it.
- Ideally, shouldn't depend on access to Google's search, even if that means its covers much less of the web. I guess Google dependency is why Searx searches randomly and often fail.
I think many metasearches are useless because syntax such as quotation marks tends to get lost along the way.
What is your current go-to search engine?
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I use Searx's "general" search just because I don't know anything better, not because I think it's very useful. When Searx is useless and it's important, I use DDG, whose Gabriel Weinberg apparently donated about $ 3,500 to Trisquel. I think DDG is or was Abrowser's default search engine.
YaCy looks good. Their demo doesn't work for me, though. Enter something, it says "loading…", then "The search service is not available right now. Please try again." I guess I'd have to install it to try it.
Very nice! This "YaCy" had been eluding me. To my luck, the demo search is working. It DOES look good.
Cheers
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Thanks for the feedback, that's great news, perhaps I can get the YaCy demo to work for me by tweaking my browser settings.
Duckduckgo recently reminded me that it's just as useless as Searx: A search for foobar fnord returned many results that contained only one of the two terms. (Actually I used different words.) Then I tried foobar AND fnord but that didn't change anything. On DDG's "about" page, I didn't find anything looking like a link to general usage instructions. Ironically, my attempt to use their search engine to find instructions for said search engine failed, too.
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Thanks, that's much better! Where did you learn this and why didn't I find such help at the site?
But use the non-JS site with, for example:
+hagebau +betriebsrat
Above "no results", it shows one result, which doesn't contain the first of the two terms, not even in the code. Perhaps at the time the page got crawled, there was an advertisement or a later deleted passage containing the term. Or DDG includes terms in linked, linking or nearby pages.
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Success! +"hagebau" +betriebsrat gives no results, while
+"hagebau" +betriebsräte does give some about surveillance and intimidation of employees.
The false positive from +hagebau +betriebsrat was probably due to several words on that page ending in …hagen.
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But why did DDG find this page when I used +"hagebau" +betriebsräte but not when I used +"hagebau" +betriebsrat despite "Betriebsrat" being in the page???
And I just checked with Searx. Searx gives me 4 different lists of results depending on whether I used + and/or "". So it doesn't seem to ignore it. It's better than I said it was, I just wish usage instructions were easier to find for both Searx and DDG.
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