Search Engines Not a Software Freedom Issue (But a Potential Privacy Problem), According to Richard Stallman
Video: Richard Stallman About Search Engines
THIS question/answer from 2010 predates some of the very worst aspects of today's search engines, which manifest lots of proprietary JavaScript, demanding proprietary (or OSPS) browsers.
There are several Free software implementations and we're exploring our options for search in Techrights. Yacy is one of them.
As some readers may have noticed, as promised before the Christmas period, work has been done on the wiki. At the moment more images (but not all) are showing up. There's more to come. One of the downsides of adding local search is that it makes DDoS attacks easier. Making a decent 'catalogue' of past articles takes a lot of work, but it has its advantages over search because of contextual relationships between page. █