 I've never really been all that happy with any other search engine other than Google. And I know as an open source advocate, that sounds really bad. But when it comes to searching things, I don't have a lot of patience. Like I want the results that I need on the front page, usually within the first few results. And I want to move on with my day. I don't want to have to search through multiple pages. I don't have to want to worry about having to come up with the correct search terms that are exactly the way they need to be worded in order to actually find what I'm looking for. And while everyone has their problems with Google and Google can be considered very evil and they're going to steal my data and all this stuff. The one thing you can't deny is that they can do search really, really well. So in all honesty, I haven't spent a lot of time trying to find another search engine. I've tried DuckDuckGo. It's not good. And I know that I'm going to have somebody in the comments saying, well, I always have really good results with DuckDuckGo. I don't. Okay, I just I never have. And the thing is, is that even on the stream that I did this past Sunday, I used DuckDuckGo for some stuff. And even right on that stream, there were multiple times where I would have to redo the search by using the Google bang just to get proper search results because DuckDuckGo didn't give me the things that I was looking for. And that happened multiple times just on that stream. And when I use DuckDuckGo, it happens all the time. Like it's just something that, well, I do my search on DuckDuckGo. It doesn't give me the things that I want on the front page. I'm sure that the stuff that I want is there. I just have to dig for it. But I don't. So I just end up doing the Google search in the first place. So I might as well just use Google. Now I know there are other options. So things that something like start page is an option, which is basically just Google results, but filtered through all the start page nonsense. To be honest, I really haven't given start page enough of a chance. So maybe that's something that I can look into. But for the most part, an alternative search engine just hasn't been something that has been something that I've found. So when someone suggested that I try Circs, I was very doubtful because this is a self-hosted search engine that you can customize pretty much any way you want. And I wasn't expecting, I just wasn't expecting much. I was expecting it to kind of suck. And that's probably why I put off trying it for quite a long time. But I have been using it now for two weeks. And I have to be honest, it's actually pretty good. Now it's definitely not Google, okay? It's definitely not something that you can just get on there and absolutely use the minute you have it installed to find everything that you want to find. It's just not the way it works. Instead, you have to kind of fine tune it to the point where it works for you. So let's go ahead and take a look at the instance that I've been using. So this is Circs. And this instance itself is called Paul Go. Now I don't know who runs this instance, but it seems to be pretty good. And when you go to the Circs main page where it shows you a whole bunch of public instances, it will tell you what the speed of that instance happens to be from your location. And this was the fastest one for me. That's the reason why I've chosen it. Now this is a special version of Circs called Circs XNG and it apparently has some extra features. I don't know what those extra features are, so don't ask me about that. The point is, is it has a few extra customizations that you can make in order to make it better. But this is Circs and this is the home page you'd get if you ran your own instance or used somebody else's and it just functions basically like any search engine where Circs differs is with the settings. So there's a lot of settings here that you can change in order to customize how your search results are not only delivered to you, but also where those search results come from. So for example, you can change where the auto suggestions come from. So by default it comes from Google, but you can have those come from basically anywhere. You can also change the default categories and the language and whether or not the safe search is on and so much more just on this first page. Once you get past this, the real power comes when you go to this engines page and this allows you to choose where your search results come from. Now this is where you could kind of go into a rabbit hole because you can customize these things basically any way you want. You can include all the ones that you want to include for different types of searches. So you can include these for general. You can include these for images, these for videos, these for news and so on and so forth all the way up to social media and files and science and IT all this stuff and each category can be individually customized from where those results come from. So you can choose being brave, duck, duck, go just a ton of different providers. And this also kind of dictates how fast your searches are. So if you care about the speed of your searches more than maybe the accuracy or the content of them, you can turn off some of these sources and your speed of your search will actually go faster. If you have a whole if you have like all of these enabled, your search will go slower. Now as you can see, there's a lot of different providers that you can choose from. The one thing I do wish is that it would let you give priority to some of them because it doesn't really do that. At least it's not something that you can customize at least something that not that I've found instead when you search for something. So let me search for very creatively the Linux cast. If we search for that you can see here on the bottom it tells you where those results have come from and it does that basically on its own. So you can't really tell it that you always want Google results at the top. As far as again, as far as I know. But it does a fairly good job of giving you what you want right at the top because it does bring in things from quant, Google, duck, duck, go, all those things that I had selected. And it does a pretty good job of ranking the things that I'm actually searching for. So in this case it actually does bring up the Linux cast right at the top. That's not even something that at one point duck, duck, go even did. So when I was at probably about 4,000 subscribers now I got to remember it's just 4,000 subscribers is not like on Mr. Beast or anything. And I searched for the Linux cast on duck, duck, go at that point because of course the thing that you do is search for yourself. It wouldn't it didn't even show my channel on duck, duck, go I'm don't know whether or not that's changed. And I actually can, you know, we can go find out. So let's we'll just see here. And yeah, it comes at the top now. But at one point it didn't write overall, I've been like I said really impressed with the way this works because like I said, just on this search here, if you scroll down just a little bit, you'll see that all the results are very relevant to what I searched for. So everyone pertains to me. And that's what you would expect. Now once you get, you know, closer to the bottom, you do find some that aren't having to do with the actual podcast or the channel. But you do get the most relevant ones that are actually accurate right at the top. And while there have been some instances over the last two or three weeks where I've had to leave this and go to Google, for the most part, I've been able to do all my searches here. And that's not something like I said I was ever able to do with duck, duck, go and I still can't do it. So the actual searching on Sirks has been miles and away better than duck, duck, go in my opinion. Now I can't really compare that to Brave Search because I haven't used Brave Search in quite a while. When I first used it, it was just out of beta and it wasn't very good. I've heard that it's gotten way better. So I don't know how this would compare with that. In terms of comparing it to Google, it's actually been, like I said, really good. And while I will say that it is slower than Google, it's not something that I haven't been able to put up with, you know, it's reasonably fast. So if I search for, let's just say DistroTube, like so, you can see it takes a little while to come up, but it's not horrendously slow or anything. So what are the downsides? So one thing is first is that I'm relying on someone else's instance. So if this goes away, I would be pretty much out of my search engine. I am planning on hosting my own eventually. I'm still kind of in the planning stages of that, but I don't know when that's going to happen. Right now I'm still relying on this. The other thing I will say is that the images aren't all that great. So for example, if I searched for a file clipart, just a picture of a clipart of a file, it's something that I do for images or thumbnails all the time. So I search for, go to the images tab, and it's going to give me the things that I want. But one of the great things about Google images is that there are options that you can choose from here at the top that will allow you to filter out certain types of images. So say you wanted a image that had no background. So while we do get some options with no background, I'm assuming that actually has no background because that's the way it appears. But sometimes like you're kind of guessing here because sometimes, you know, it just like you don't know if that has a background doesn't have a background. Some of them don't load all the time either. It's just not great because there's no way to filter it out. You have to kind of guess now that one, see that one there does not have a background because you saw it disappear. So that makes me think that this one here does have a background is that weird checker thing. But the point is, like I said, you can't filter those out, at least there's no way that I've found. So that's kind of a big deal for me. So a lot of times when I have to search for an image is I just use Google. So that's about the main time I've ever just not went here at all and went to Google or used something else in order to find the images that I want. Because about 80% of the time when I'm searching for an image, I want to find it without the background. And there, like I said, there doesn't seem to be a way to filter those out here. So bottom line on search is that I've been very impressed with it. It's been really good to me. If the image search was just a little bit better, I'd be even, I'd be very, very happy with even more than I am now. And I hope that that's something that they can fix along the line. Just give me an option to only see PNGs because half the time PNGs are going to have no backgrounds. So that could be an option. I understand that it's probably a tricky thing to do. But again, when you're competing at least a little bit with Google, you kind of have to have those options. So that is it for this video. Like I said, I'm working on having my own instance of this. I don't know whether or not I'm going to make that public or not. We'll have to see how that goes. Hosting costs and stuff like that can kind of be a pain in the butt. But anyways, if you have comments on this, you can leave those comments in the comment section below. You can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast. You can follow me on Mastodon. That link will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon on patreon.com slash the Linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to thank my current patrons, Robert Sid, Devon Patrick, Fred Kramer, Maglin, Jackson, I'm Jules, Steve A. Sebrega, Linux, Garrick, Samuel, KB, TGP, Keith, Andy, Uncle Bonehead, Triedevil, Gary, Antoine, Mitchell, J-Doug, CarbonData, Jeremy, Sean, Odin, Martin, Ross, Eduardo, Artson, Elliott, Merrick, Kamp, Joshua Lee, Peter, a Crucible, Dark Fantasy, Primus, and BM. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.