Comment by SyneRyder

+1 so much for this. I have been doing the same, an SQLite database of my "own personal internet" of the sites I actually need. I use it as a tiny supplementary index for a metasearch engine I built for myself - which I actually did to replace Kagi.

Building a metasearch engine is not hard to do (especially with AI now). It's so liberating when you control the ranking algorithm, and can supplement what the big engines provide as results with your own index of sites and pages that are important to you. I admit, my results & speed aren't as good as Kagi, but still good enough that my personal search engine has been my sole search engine for a year now.

If a site doesn't want me to crawl them, that's fine. I probably don't need them. In practice it hasn't gotten in the way as much as I might have thought it would. But I do still rely on Brave / Mojeek / Marginalia to do much of the heavy lifting for me.

I especially appreciate Marginalia for publicly documenting as much about building a search engine as they have: https://www.marginalia.nu/log/