Previously I was looking for search engine that turned out it wasnt worth remembering afterall. As people helped, i thought its easier to just list every site its not. The site I was looking for turned out to be maintained by some rightwing assholes, but I thought maybe it could still be useful as it collects scrapers from many engines into one site. But since it apparently blocks lqbt domains, its basically worthless since who knows what else it blocks. Apparently anything those fucks touch is tainted.
I tried describing the site based on what I remembered and how it appeared to me. now it feels shameful even leaving it as context. The picture gets conveyed through the comments anyway for those interested.
I’m sorry it ended up like this, I should probably have done this much eariler and not give the site any benefit of the doubt.
So, instead lets make this into list of search engines so this post might have at least something positive about it. I already started gathering the list earlier as by product of the unfortunate search. It might be better to just scrap this all and start with new post but it would also erase what happened and the lesson learned.
I know there are lists already, but I dont think they all have every engine, especially smaller or newer ones. We could also gather information about engines’ maintainers, stuff that helps determine what to expect from them. I’ll try gathering it here on this post from the comments and if I find something myself.
Lets avoid all ai searchers since those ought to be in their own category anyway.
List of search engines
- bing
- kagi
- yacy
- ask.com
- searx
- brave
- ecosia
- mojeek
- duckduckgo
- marginalia
- startpage
- giburu
- yippy
- qwant
Sorry to say this, but the search engine that fits your 4 bullet points the best is Bing.
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.
Sounds like some small, private website that simply had any search engine’s input field embedded.
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.
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.
yeah, it might be that too. But that could also be useful.
I started to down vote you, but with the verification stuff Bing does make sense.
Kagi doesn’t do that
Bing is also the only search engine I know that plasters their site with images.