Hey #Fediverse! @Seirdy has a 'forever' article: A look at search engines with their own indexes
One thing this article should remind you all about: there are three dominant #search indexes - Google, Bing, and Yandex. And Yandex is dominant outside of English.
But there are real options, and many of them are open source, especially for outside the commercial internet. (I am partial to the MarginaliaSearch project.)
GitHub - MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch: Internet search engine for text-oriented websites. Indexing the small, old and weird web.
Internet search engine for text-oriented websites. Indexing the small, old and weird web. - GitHub - MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch: Internet search engine for text-oriented websites. Indexing ...GitHub