Are there any good search engines that work with eww. I’d like to use duckduckgo.com because it’s what I’m used to, but neither html.duckduckgo.com and lite.duckduckgo.com work. I also tried changing my user-agent with (setq url-user-agent “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/115.0”), but then I got a bot test that I couldn’t figure out how to complete in eww.
It is strange, because “You can open a URL or search the web with the command M-x eww. If the input doesn’t look like a URL or domain name the web will be searched via eww-search-prefix. The default search engine is DuckDuckGo.” - according to eww manual. So when you enter keywords at the prompt after M-x eww, it will search using DDG.
Gonna answer the part about alternative search engines, Ive been experimenting with trying to self host SearXNG and using that locally along with EWW. SearXNG on public instances doesnt really work after a few queries cause of the Anubis check and few other inconveniences. So if you want to get the metasearch capabilities and dont mind too much about the potential privacy loss from not having a public instance (although then again, for a public instance you have to trust the provider), you can self host it pretty smoothly. Theres also the benefit of taking more time before some search provider you use presents you with a captcha since its mainly your individual use. On some public instances, you may not get the results from where you wanted it cause of this. Ive been trying on my laptop, so far its been pretty fine, works really nicely for the sites where its not Javascript heavy. For those, youll have to configure emacs to send you to a browser. Ill probably follow up on this when ive gotten more comfortable with it.