One guy in Sweden built a search engine that doesn't run on Google or Bing. It's been online since 2021, and the bills come to about $200 a month. Viktor Löfgren says most "alternative" search engines are really powered by Google or Bing, or by authoritarian states like Russia and China. His engine, Marginalia, has its own crawler and index, with no ads, no loans and no investors. His argument: when nearly all search runs through a few US companies, censorship becomes easy, even by accident, and one country's cultural bias shapes what everyone finds. He isn't trying to replace Google. He wants Marginalia to be the "minority report" that keeps the big engines honest. So it ranks what they tend to bury: personal blogs, old university pages, text-heavy sites with nothing to sell. Every result shows whether a page uses affiliate links or JavaScript, and you can filter those out. An "explore" mode just shows you random sites from the index. It's keyword-based on purpose. Löfgren argues that the better a search engine gets at answering questions, the worse it gets at finding websites. It's open source under the AGPL, so you can host your own copy. marginalia-search.com/