@Fury @aral There's a huge table of search engines, all compared by tracking, organizational type (for-profit, non-profit, collective, hobby, personal), jurisdiction (US, countries in Europe, etc.), various safety ratings, and technical features at https://searchengine.party/
All of these can be added to a browser as a default search engine too, but it's a little convoluted. (The gist: Visit the site, right click on the URL bar, add it. Look in browser settings under search and set it as default.)
Nice! However that does not seem to show which ones have their own index, that's a very important piece of information in my opinion. For example #Mojeek has its own independent index, while DuckDuckGo does not (it uses Bing), but that difference is not seen in the list.
That’s how I’m choosing to interpret it, yes. ;D
My current best guess is that their goal is to use my engine as a proxy of sorts to scrape for sites with login and comment forms that they can use a subsequent attack on. Still working on some measures to try and prevent that kind of exploitation.
@eliasr
I mostly became aware of the list when my most recent hobby project, https://clew.se/, got added to it. ;)