It was 4get.ca , thank you for your help.

Though after knowing sites developers think its good idea to put facist’s face there, i wonder if its trustworthy searching site afterall. Also, it wasnt search engine but kind of collection of scrapers from bunch of engines so more a kin to search site or something.

Some time ago I came across some comment in lemmy that suggested a search engine that doesn’t do the usual bullshit others do and doesn’t track you.

I tried it and it seemed pretty good. It didnt filter or manage what it showed you, it just searched and gave you the list like search engines used to do.

I set it up as my homepage so i can use it easily as another search, but now my browsers homepage has been reset and i didn’t have it saved anywhere else. So, i’m asking here if any of you know what this search engine was called. I already tried searching lemmy for the comment, but all i have to go on is “search engine”. If I cant find it by asking here, i dont think i’m finding it again at all.

Here is what i remember about it:

  • address was quite short, just one word or couple of combined letters.

  • every now and then you had to do “intelligence test” (site literally called it that) to deter bots and maybe to slow down the searches. Site likely couldnt handle huge amounts of traffic. It was custom captcha where you have to select which pictures are minecraft related or which pictures have some anime girl or something like that. It never had any of the usual captcha pictures like spot the firehydrant or other stuff like that. It was pretty good captcha too, pictures werent obvious but clear enough once you took a moment to look at them.

  • mainpage had meme like picture. Occasionally somewhat nsfw picture. Maybe it was just for fun or maybe to deter crawlers. Picture was somewhat related to the website itself

    [ pic ]

----search-----

kind of like that. There was nothing else on the mainpage that i remember.

  • it didnt have any monetisation or anything like that. It was clearly some small group’s/singular persons project and they definitely didnt like the cookiecutter searchengines we have to suffer with.

-mainpage also had kind of “old internet” look. Just the search field and on top of that some random picture in sharp box.

It was not:

  • anything russia related -anything ai related
  • bing
  • kagi
  • yacy
  • ask.com
  • searx
  • brave
  • ecosia
  • mojeek
  • duckduckgo
  • marginalia
  • startpage
  • giburu
  • yippy
  • qwant
      • reksas@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
        3·
        1 day ago

        That sounds… concerning… I dont know people like that by face or name so this is good to know.

        Now i wonder if it was that good search engine afterall if they thought that was good idea. It doesnt seem to push anything malign when i searched lqbt as test, but after knowing what you told I dont feel like I can fully trust the site anyway.

        • PrivacyDingus@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          24 hours ago

          it’s a meta of some kind, like SearXNG; you can edit the way in which that works but… who knows? I hadn’t seen this image on it before today.

  • hydration9806@lemmy.mlEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    Commonly recommended ones are Kagi, SearX, and Brave. Any of those ones what you are looking for? I’ve never used any of them myself, so can’t say if they meet your criteria or not

    • reksas@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      no, it wasnt any of the common ones. I doubt it would be on any list like that, it seemed really niche

    • reksas@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      i wish, it has been destroyed multiple times by accident.

      A while ago I set up firefox to delete stuff like cache and temporary files on exit, yet it switched it to everything at some point. On top of that, I used sync to save some of the stuff i have there and of course it saved the misadjusted settings there and wiped the history every time i logged in. I noticed it was sync doing it only the second time it happened and ironically i tried using sync to save the history data. I was quite desperate when i noticed this had happened and tried even system restore, file restore to firefox profile and other files in case it might revert it, but the damage had been done who knows how long ago, so there was nothing to be done. Even on the first time I lost years of data :(

      I have been on lemmy for about 2 years and my current history goes only 4/7/2024. The comment i read must be older than that but not older than 2 years. I wish i had bookmarked it.

      • CuddlyCassowary@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        Holy moly! I wish you luck in your quest. Please let us know if you figure it out. Every engine I was going to suggest has already been mentioned by others.

        • reksas@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
          2·
          1 day ago

          Hey, someone found the engine i was looking for. It was 4get. Though it was also revealed that the site is run by people who think its good idea to put facist’s face as memepicture there.

          • CuddlyCassowary@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 day ago

            Thank you for updating me, what a rollercoaster this post was! I’ll definitely check it out (superficially at least), the fascist part is a bit disconcerting.

            • reksas@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
              2·
              1 day ago

              Yeah, though now the sites name makes sense. Must be made by someone who uses 4chan.

        • reksas@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
          3·
          2 days ago

          my only hope at this point is someone in lemmy knowing about it, so you all will know about it at same time as me if that person replys to this post. At least maybe this post might become useful as list of search engines by process of elimination :D

          I tried browsing through lemmy with searchword “search engine”, but it think the comment was relatively short like “you should try xyz” or something like that. On top of that it was reply to someone elses message.

  • Tarquinn2049@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    Gibiru isn’t on your list of things it isn’t. Maybe that one?

    Yippy and Qwant maybe… though not sure how many of your criteria they satisfy as I haven’t used them.

    • reksas@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      none of those, but at this point i’m also happy to add to the list. The one i’m looking for must come up eventually.

  • superkret@feddit.orgEnglish
    42·
    2 days ago

    Sorry to say this, but the search engine that fits your 4 bullet points the best is Bing.

    • reksas@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      it was custom made captcha. It was literally called intelligence test in slightly insulting fashion. It was definitely not in anyway corporation affiliated website. The pictures on mainsite were random meme like pictures in a box above the search field.

      I really hope that one commenter isnt literally only one in lemmy who knows about it.

      • superkret@feddit.orgEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        Sounds like some small, private website that simply had any search engine’s input field embedded.

        • reksas@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
          4·
          2 days ago

          yea, it was likely some quite small website. But results it displayed was… not necessarily really good but it didnt use any of the big search engines, when i compared the results with same search words it was different enough to be potentially useful as alternative search if some bigger engine seemed to not want to show something, be it censorship, search engine optimization fuckery or something else.

          • superkret@feddit.orgEnglish
            3·
            2 days ago

            You know, usually that difference simply comes from using a search engine directly (so it can store cookies and know your IP address and country) vs. using it via proxy website, where it doesn’t know anything about you.

    • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      I started to down vote you, but with the verification stuff Bing does make sense.

      Kagi doesn’t do that