If you can live without personalisation there are plenty of alternatives
SearX
SearX is an open-source metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 different services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. SearX can be used over Tor for online anonymity, and organisations are free to use the code or rebrand it for their own purposes. For example, Privacytools uses an instance of SearX for its own search engine. SearX queries are submitted via HTTP POST, to prevent keywords appearing in the linked sites' server logs.
Using advanced search, it's possible to locate all sorts of resources, from files to maps to torrents to scientific papers. The developers are working on new features including support for offline search engines that crawl local environments rather than the web. However, user experience, at least on the main site searx.me, is marred by frequent crashes, error messages, demands for CAPTCHAs (Google actively blocks some instances) and suggestions to try other SearX instances. Occasionally the whole site goes down, possibly because of a lack of bandwidth.
All of which means that SearX is not one for the casual user. Rather it is a project for other developers to tweak and host using their own resources.
Pros: Open source builds trust, can be adapted by whoever wants to use it, can be used over Tor, multiple search options
Cons: Primary site is error-prone
Petey Vid
YouTube keeps you hooked by delivering more of the same, in some cases winding up the dial to deliver more and more extreme content, because its algorithms have worked out that this sells more ads, never mind the consequences. Named after a ginger cat (what else?), Petey Vid is a privacy-focused and video search engine that seeks to level the playing field. It aggregates videos not only from YouTube and Vimeo but also from many other platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the Internet Archive, so you can search for videos posted all the way back 1996. Money comes from Amazon and Ebay affiliate advertising.
Users can filter on the length of the video and sort by length and recency, and there's a trending hashtag cloud to find the latest videos. Clicking the search button delivers up results with a small miaow, which is liable to have bemused cat owners looking around to see what their pet moggy is up to.
Search is multilingual and Petey Vid claims to have indexed 446 million videos. On the privacy front, the site claims not to use any trackers, nor to store the user's IP address or search terms. All searches are SSL encrypted.
Petey Vid is a really useful site that allows video searchers to escape the usual filter algorithms. To make it even more convenient we'd like to see some more options for refining results such as language and source.
Pros: Lots of videos on many platforms going back to the year dot, that miaow keeps the mice away
Cons: Could do with more filters for refining searches
