Considering the potential of the fediverse, is there any version of that for search engines? Something to break up a major point of internet centralization, fragility, and inertia to change (eg Google will never, ever, offer IPFS searches). Not only would decentralization be inherently beneficial, it would mean we’re no longer compelled to hand over private information to centralized unvetted corporations like Google, Microsoft, and DuckDuckGo.
We might be better off going back to web rings, word of mouth, and searching websites like Wikipedia and Imdb directly. I, for one, am sick of being funneled into the same bad results every time I search. The same old forum posts from 10 years ago with outdated information, many of which claim “your question was answered already!” followed by a dead link or a flame war.
I was just telling my friend this
This is the best I know of yet. It’s a wrapper for google. You’re definitely right that we need a decentralized one that understands the distributed governance structure of the fediverse
SearXNG is probably the closest equivalent, as it’s decentralized, you can host your own, and you can grab search results from over 100 engines with it. Search engines don’t really federate like the Fediverse does; they just query each other as proxies for you and return the search results.