This post is part of a series in which I am detailing my move away from centralized, proprietary network services. Previous posts in this series: email, feed reader.
Of all Google services, you’d think the hardest to replace would be search. Yet, although search is critical for navigating the web, the switching costs are low — no data portability issues, easy to use more than one search engine, etc. Unfortunately, there isn’t a straightforward libre web search solution ready yet, but switching away from Google to something that’s at least more privacy-friendly is easy to do now.
Quick Alternative: DuckDuckGo
In on sense, degooglifying search is easy: use DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo has a strong no-tracking aproach to privacy. The !bang syntax is awesome (hello !wikipedia), the search results are decent (though I still often !g for more technical, targeted or convoluted searches), it doesn’t have any search-plus-your-world nonsense or whatever walled garden stuff Google has been experimenting with lately, and it’s pretty solid on the privacy side. After just a few days, DuckDuckGo replaced Google as my default search engine, and my wife has since switched over as well.
The switch from Google Search to DuckDuckGo is incredibly easy and well worth it. If you’re still using Google Search, give DuckDuckGo a try — you’ve got nothing to lose.
But… DuckDuckGo isn’t a final destination. Remember: the point of this exercise isn’t for me to “leave Google,” but to leave Google’s proprietary, centralized, walled gardens for free and autonomous alternatives. DuckDuckGo is a step towards autonomy, as web search sans tracking, but it is still centralized and proprietary.
Web Search Freedom
A libre search solution calls for a much bigger change — from proprietary to free, from centralized to distributed, from a giant database to a peer-to-peer network — not just a change in search engines, but a revolution in web search.
YaCy
Last summer, I ran a search engine out of my living room for a few months: YaCy — a cross-platform, free software, decentralized, peer-to-peer search engine. Rather than relying on a single centralized search provider, YaCy users can install the software on their own computers and connect to a network of other YaCy users to perform web searches. It’s a libre, non-tracking, censorship-resistant web search network. The problem was that it wasn’t stable or mature enough last summer to power my daily web searches. I intend to install it again soon, because as a peer-to-peer effort it needs users and usage in order to improve, but an intermediate step like DuckDuckGo is necessary in the meantime.
Although YaCy is designed to be installed on your own computer, there is a public web search portal available as a demo.
Seeks
Seeks is another interesting project that takes a different approach to web search freedom. Seeks is “an open, decentralized platform for collaborative search, filtering and content curation.” As far as I understand, Seeks doesn’t replace existing search engines, but it adds a distributed network layer on top of them, giving users more control over search queries and results. That is, Seeks is a P2P collaborative filter for web search rather than a P2P indexer like YaCy. Rather than replacing web indexing, Seeks is focused on the privacy, control, and trust surrounding search queries and results, even if it sits on top of proprietary search engines.
Seeks also has a public web search portal (and DuckDuckGo supports !seeks). As you can tell, its results are much better than YaCy’s, but Seeks is tackling a smaller problem and still relying on existing search engines to index the web.
Conclusion
DuckDuckGo, though proprietary and centralized, provides some major privacy advantages over Google and is ready to be used today — especially with Google just a !g away.
But web search freedom requires a revolution like that envisioned by YaCy or Seeks. Seeks seems like more of a practical, incremental and realistic solution, but it still depends on proprietary search. YaCy is more of a complete solution, but it’s not clear whether its vision is technically feasible.
I intend to experiment with both of these projects — p2p services need users to improve — and continue to watch this space for new developments.
