Web search#
The Web tab is Seurch’s core. It can draw on four independent web indexes and blend whatever you enable into one ranked list.
The four engines#
| Engine | What it is |
|---|---|
| Brave | A large independent web index (also powers Images, News and Videos). |
| Mojeek | An independent UK search index with its own crawler. |
| Marginalia | A non-commercial index focused on the small, non-commercial web. |
| Staan | A European index built by European Search Perspective, the Qwant / Ecosia joint venture. Web results only. |
You choose which engines to use in Settings → Engines, under Web. Enable just one for a single source, or several to blend them. The selection is per search type, so the engines behind your web results never touch Images or News, see Settings.
On a self-hosted instance every engine the operator has a key for is on by default. On the hosted service a new account starts on Brave and Staan, and the others wait to be switched on.
Staan stops paginating after an offset of 30, so it contributes to the first four pages of a search and then drops out, and it skips queries longer than 400 characters. The other engines carry on answering either way.
How results are blended#
When more than one engine returns results, Seurch merges them with Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) rather than just concatenating the lists:
- Each result URL scores points based on how high it ranks in each engine that returned it.
- The same URL from several engines collapses into one entry, and its scores add up, so a page multiple engines agree on rises toward the top.
- Each merged result shows which engines contributed it, so you can see when there is cross-engine agreement.
The effect: broad, mainstream results that everyone surfaces rank highly, while the distinctive finds from a single index (especially Marginalia’s small-web results) still appear.
Refining a search#
- Time range — filter to the last day, week, month or year.
- Safe search — on by default; turn it off in Settings to include adult results.
- Spelling corrections — when a query looks misspelled, Seurch surfaces a suggested correction above the results.
- Pagination — page through more results at the bottom of the list.
- Languages — set a preferred search language in Settings, or leave it on Auto to follow your browser.
Blocking sites#
You can hide results from domains you never want to see. Add them under Settings → Blocked sites; matching results are filtered out of every web search. This list is stored against your account.
Bangs#
Type a !bang anywhere in your query to redirect it, for example !w einstein
goes straight to Wikipedia, and !images sunset jumps to the Images tab. See
Bangs for the full story.