[BRLTTY] Is there a feature-compatible text-based broser

Kyle kyle at gmx.it
Tue Sep 16 23:21:42 UTC 2025


I really do like searx-ng, especially after I found that DuckDuckGo is 
just Microsoft search without the "Bing" name, from the Microsoft server 
IP addresses it runs on all the way down to the Microsoft ads it shows. 
But the main website I used at searx.org went down for like a day 
recently, so I'll definitely keep f5t.de in mind, probably as the 
primary method for scraping the interwebs. I was in a hurry to find 
something though when searx.org went down, and remembered something 
called Gigablast that also works well. Wikipedia will tell you that 
Gigablast died in 2023, but that's only because gigablast.com stopped 
working. Gigablast.org works perfectly well though, so there's another 
nice one to add to the list.


Gigablast is actually an open source search engine with its own crawler, 
so it's not a metasearch at all, this one's actually doing its own heavy 
lifting, a selling point for some. I don't see any ads on the main site 
either, although I'm not sure I want to try self-hosting it even on my 
fiber connection. I just don't know that I have a beefy enough box for a 
search engine that does its own crawling. But anywho, these are two good 
options to get away from Google as well as to keep using those 
text-based browsers that seem to get themselves blocked from or simply 
don't work properly with things like the big bad G.

~Kyle



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