Hi all,
I’m currently wanting to make a few wiki pages for a community I host here on PieFed. Not trying to advertise the community, but for context, it’s a community about BY-NC-SA licensed music, and I’m wanting to create a guide as to how to find new music with that license on certain platforms.
My trouble is this. I want to provide those viewing posts with the ability to find music with ease utilizing search engines when that’s the best option to do so. However, I also don’t want to have that search engine be Google if that’s at all possible.
The main features I’m needing are to only fetch results from certain websites, and to specifically include or exclude specific phrases. For example, if I wanted to find BY-NC-SA power metal music on BandCamp, and exclude songs from the band Blind Desire for some random reason, I’d have the following search:
In this case, Google only fetches results from bandcamp.com, only with the BY-NC-SA license, and only with the words “power metal” in the page, while also removing results from Blind Desire.
Are there any privacy-friendly options that have similar search features? Being made aware of an alternative like this will definitely help me kick what little reliance I have left on Google.
Thanks in advance.
I like to use https://searx.neocities.org/ It randomises your search across several searx instances. It’s not always reliable as some instances are sometimes down or exceed request limit. But retrying often works. Worst case i use mojeek or ddg
Been using qwant recently and have to say, its pretty nice so far
A good amount of this is available on Mojeek: https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/08/mojeek-operators-a-guide.html (my employer).
Search is keyword based so the words should be matched in most cases without quotes (omitting stemming here as a possibility); you cannot -“two words” but you could -blind -desire
I gave this a shot since I do like and trust Mojeek, but unfortunately it doesn’t appear to bring in any results when I use the search “site:bandcamp.com attribution non-commercial share alike” (not in quotes).
indeed so, thanks for flagging this I’ll get it raised so we can see what’s going on there
Currently, I prefer the Kagi model as my daily driver – pay a small fee each month and not worry about having your search data, in all its forms, sold instead. They have some neat features, as well, like AI summaries and the ability to ask questions about pages. It’s those two features I have used to determine what kind of content, even musical, may be on the page for me without having to go to the page, itself.
There is also SearXNG, which is an open source, privacy-respecting, hackable metasearch engine. It can be self-hosted and also has a number of instances you can access.
SearXNG also lets you use Google as one of the engines, allowing you to obtain Google search results anonymously.
afaik duckduckgo knows all of this.
site: limits the site to search on, even shows a warning for that.
“quotes” make sure all results contain the word.
-apple make sure you wont see results where the page contains this wordWhy not searx
searx only meta-search. no support for syntax (mention “search phrase” syntax in doc, but only supported because some search engine used support it)
Good to know!
Taking a look at Swisscows right now. My only concern with them is that I know they filter out sites with adult content, and I do have worries on how that’s applied to results with explicit song lyrics or album covers.
