Just came across this while scrolling pixelfed!
A Canadian hosted search engine.
I have been using Ecosia, but will have to try this out.
Use this with Lemmy.ca, Mstdn.ca, Pixelfed.ca, CBC, 1Password, Ground News, Graphene OS, Loops, Pendora.io, Interac.
It’s SearXNG
It’s worth knowing that SearXNG (Wikipedia) is an open-source metasearch engine that has many available hosts. At the bottom of maapl.net is a link to a list of public instances. maapl.net isn’t actually on the list yet, but there’s one other Canadian host, https://searxng.shreven.org/. For any non-Canadians who catch this, there’s a bunch of other instances you might want to try, e.g. in Europe.
Thank you for this awesome comment! I will be saving those 2 instances in my bookmarks.
No ads? How do they pay their server fees on a sustainable basis?
SearXNG is pretty lightweight to run, it’s mostly run by the same kind of people who host Mastodon and other fediverse instances, often off the same servers. maapl.net is run by Mike Fraser, @[email protected] from the image in OP, where thecanadian.social is his donation-supported, Canadian-focussed Mastodon instance. I don’t know whether the funding for maapl.net comes out of that same donation pool, but it would make sense.
I just added it as my default on my phone to give it a try. First impressions are that search is slow (they say they combine results from multiple search engines so maybe that’s why?) but the few searches I did returned what I expected from any search engine.
Thanks for posting this! I hope it turns out to be a good enough to keep as my default!
You’re welcome!! I am hopeful too.
