I've been using different versions of SearX for a long while (sometimes on my server, sometimes through a provider like Disroot) as my standard search engine, since I've never had great luck with the big names, and it's decent, but between upstream provider quota limits, and just the fact that it relies on corporate search APIs at all, sometimes the quality craters.

While I haven't had the energy to run YaCy on my own, and public instances tend to not have a long life, I don't have nearly as much experience with it, but when I have gotten to try it out, the search itself looked great, but generally didn't have as broad or current an index. Long-term, though, it (and its protocol) is probably going to be the way to go, if only because a company can't randomly tank it like they can with the meta-search systems or their own interfaces.

Looking at Presearch for the first time now, the search results look almost surprisingly good if poorly sorted, but the fact that I now know orders of magnitude more about their finances and their cryptocurrency token than what and how the thing actually searches makes me worry a bit about its future.

Not decentralized, but I have been using Kagi for around six months and it has changed the way I view the internet for the better. I love how you can also rank sites you trust higher so they appear in more searches. The only problem I have had is searching for shopping links here in Japan sometimes is a little wonky, so I still will use google when I want to just see how much an item costs on average online.

I have never thought about decentralized search. Could be an interesting rabbit hole to fall into.

I've run yacy and searxng, and I find yacy flaky. I get really random search results, often not useful at all. I like Searxng though, although once in a while I have to hit refresh to get my result. Probably a simple fix, I've just never bothered to go down the rabbit hole.

Google was already shit for years. Its purpose nowadays is not to deliver whatever search results the user requested, it’s purpose is to keep the user dangling so that he clicks on one of the sponsored links - that’s money.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason you won’t find anything anymore on Google.

You can try DuckDuckGo. They are pretty open on what they do. The search engine is Bing and the maps come from Apple and you can chose your preferred AI from a list.

I haven’t heard about the decentralized search engines. Are they any good? Or are they more in like a proof of concept stage?

I have tried none of those that you mentioned, but over heard good things about SearX. Sorry that I can't be more helpful.

It seems like only YaCy is an independent search engine in this list and not some Metasearchengine

Now that Google is slowly but surely going to shits,

Slowly? Did you just wake from a coma from 2013? Because if so.....literally nothing about life is about to make sense. I mean, not even talking about search engines anymore. You went into a coma with a black president trying to get healthcare for all Americans, and woke up to the bad timeline from Back To The Future II. Except in this reality, it's even worse. Even Biff never gave nazi salutes....

If you host a system that uses the Google APIs, it seems to me that you don't get any privacy gain since being you the only one using it, Google knows it's you. I've been using startpage for a year now and I've been happy about it; I've never had to use Google anymore.

Now that Google is slowly but surely going to shits

https://udm14.com/

I am using whoogle as a front end for Google search, I want to set up searx but don't have the skill right now.

Presearch

I've tried Yacy plenty of times in the past. It seems to get the job done the best, in my opinion, and gives you a lot of control.