search engines

june 1, 2026

the lore

search engines are one of if not the most important tool on the internet, without it the internet wouldnt be the same. but overtime, there has been a clear monopoly of one company in this space google controling around 90% of the market.

the options

so as a part of de-googling my tech, i am off google as a search engine. there are a lot of options to choose from, but none of them are as perfect as google or are just ugly.

  1. duckduckgo - mostly privacy focused but not the best results
    • its based on bing for search results
    • has a ai interface with couple of models
    • best set it and forget it option
  2. startpage - the privacy beast
    • it is mostly the most private search engine u can find
    • has a anonymous view to view webpages
    • could be annoying for having support banners
  3. omnisearch - a metasearch engine with a clean design
    • it is written in C
    • it combines results from ddg, startpage, yahoo, mojeek
    • it is self hosted
    • per engine results
    • beautiful design

the choice

after testing all three of these and more, i ultimately settled with omnisearch as my daily driver. it was the best option than the other ones because it essentially combined results from 4 search engines into one, giving the best possible result most of the time.

i decided to host a instance of omnisearch per device, as i have no "server" which is going 24/7 and it barely uses any resources

install omnisearch

installing it is just compling a C program.

but first install libbeaker 

git clone https://git.bwaaa.monster/beaker
cd beaker
make
sudo make install

now install omnisearch 

git clone https://git.bwaaa.monster/omnisearch
cd omnisearch
make
sudo make install-<init>

replace <init> with your init system (openrc, systemd, runit, s6, dinit, launchd).

so after installing for your init system, the omnisearch process will start at boot. omnisearch starts the webpage at http://localhost:8087

integrate omnisearch

you can add it as a search engine in your browser 

# URL with %s in place of search term 
http://localhost:8087/search?q=%s

you can customize omnisearch using the config file located at /etc/omnisearch/config.ini

this is omnisearch looks