Search engines with their own indexes: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes.html

#YaCy: slow, with mostly irrelevant results

Very true, but the second part, mostly irrelevant results is a matter of degree. #Google's results were once fantastic, but these days, a big chunk of the first five pages of a search are irrelevant results, often SEO'd into high positions and knocking relevant results lower.

#Bing (and #Yahoo, #DDG, and others who use Bing's results) are also described with increasing accuracy by "mostly irrelevant results".

But yes, YaCy's results are even worse. I want to set up another YaCy instance, just to crawl sites of interest in various topics. I know there's a major software change needed to get the most improvement in search results, but having the right information in the global index is a necessary precursor to producing good results.