actually awesome and fast search engine (depending on which instance you use) with no trashy AI and ADs results also great for privacy, if you don’t know which instance to use go to https://searx.space/ and choose an instance closest to you
Been rocking self-hosted Searxng for the last 3 weeks now as my default search engine; it’s as good or better than DDG and certainly better than Google. Results I need are usually within the first three items, no extraneous shit.
I thought I’d just try it out, but it’s staying. The ability to tune the background engines is awesome. My search history is private (though I wasn’t that worried about DDG, there was no way in fuck I was using Kagi) since it’s running it’s searches via a VPN and returning me results locally.
Keep in mind that to protect your privacy you should also share your instance with others. All the searches are still linked to an IP which can be abused as well.
Yes, that’s the purpose of the VPN. It’s out there mixed in with everyone else that’s using that exit node.
Honestly, it’s not too much of a concern to me, I’m not doing anything illegal or naughty, it’s just making sure I’m not part of the dataset.
Why wouldn’t you use Kagi?
Because I don’t want a direct link to payment information and my search history stored and sold later.
How does it work self hosting? Is it querying other search engines or just maintaining a database on your server?
It’s a meta search engine: it aggregates results from multiple sources for your search query. So yes, it queries other search engines.
Its all calls to other engines, that you can choose and tune. So its making those calls and filtering out shit like AI results, and then ranking it to return back to you. Seems to do a good job.
it’s as good or better than
It’s only as good as the search engines you select. Which ones have you selected?
Defaults are working fine, I might have added one or two.
What does it default to? Google+bing+DDG?
Can someone explain the meaning of the name and the people having this project please?
You’re trusting how information is filtered and funneled to you with a search tool, but a change to take lightly. Google sucks, but they have a lot to lose, a lot of eyes on them and I know generally their base motivations.
Fortunately, you can read through the source code of SearxNG and even modify it - provided that you also publish the modified version to your users if you host it publicly.
You can run your own instance, public or private. Or you can use a public instance.
Internally, it uses other search engines, rather than crawling the entire web and indexing everything.
Did anyone else not know Lycos was still around? Lycos is still around. Seems not that bad. No AI stuff.
btw
I mean it’s often better than nothing, but it is a meta search that still often uses Google or Bing to gather results. IMHO, cut off the need for that data on the whole and use an option like Mojeek
Mojeek reminds me of early Google results which only searches title and inurl I like it
The homepage took 5 seconds to load. I’ll pass.
not sure what’s happening there for you, speed is one of the things which people frequently say we do well for
Not at all for me
Let me tell you about waiting for AskJeeves to load up in the 90s.
Web crawler indeed
For all their talk of doing things different with their own index and rankings. Mojeek is following exactly what Google did. It’s still an ad based business model that makes users into products to be sold to advertisers. They’re good now, while still trying to build market share. But once their investors get hungry, the enshitification will commence.
we make money mainly from our api, our investors are patient private capital and we don’t take vc, appreciate your point but these are fundamentally different situations, our ads (when they run) will also be contextual so more of a ddg situation than a “makes users into products to be sold to advertisers”
fair enough if it’s not for you though
API index access is an important difference.
If it was only that, without public facing ad driven search, I’d be more impressed.Maybe if you removed the adds, and severely rate limited your own public facing search, so it’s more of a demo than an actual service. This would force you to solely make money off the API access, without directly competing against those customers.
That would be an honest buisness model. One that doesn’t turn users into eyeballs for advertising. Which seems to me, to be the most insidious problem of the modern internet.
Agree to disagree here, but I’ll refer to Cory Doctorow for a contextual vs behavioral/tracking ads comparison, one which is very good: https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#contextual-ads (applied to the media, but the general thread is relevant)
I don’t know if the comparison is inaccurate.
You make money from advertising to your users (“ddg situation” notwithstanding), are beholden to your investors (private status notwithstanding) and need to see more users to increase revenue. The person above you is saying that this model is what will drive you to eventually be as bad as Google. Do you understand?
We make money from our API, what they’re referencing is a beta ads programme which was running
Do you have topics that are censored? I searched for my reddit post “what I’ve learnt from the mantis aliens”, and it does not show up in your results. Neither at google’s. But it does on other search engines. The ufo/alien stuff are censored in most search engines, while there isn’t a reason to be. That is how I judge search engines. And Mojeek doesn’t give me the results I asked for.
Reddit doesn’t allow us to crawl: https://www.reddit.com/robots.txt
Is that legally binding? What happens of they catch you, ban your IPs then you’re in the same situation as now. Literally no reason to not do it IMO.
IP already hits a wall, also better to not get a reputation as a bad bot, it’s taken a while to get known for being friendly and respecting rules, to us you should follow robots
I seem to recall creative ways to index things without robots, e.g. browser addon that users opt into to send pages and such, essentially crowdsourcing the indexing. Anyways good to see you’re taking the high road!
deleted by creator
which language are we talking?
You can use Mojeek with SearXNvm with nothing enabled but Mojeek returned no results, I wonders why is that?I could be wrong but didn’t Mojeek also index results from Google and Bing?I’m wrong they index their own results, I mean Qwant is a search engine built in EU and they index their own resultsqwant is bing, mainly
It’s pretty nice. The REST API for running searches makes running SearxNG worth it, if nothing else.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by that?
I’d use it if its public instances didn’t get rate-limited so often
I stopped using it not because of the results but because you couldn’t swipe back without it sending you to the base website.
On DuckDuckGo (and google n others) a search is shown in the URL like looking for frog:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=frog&t=fpas&ia=webHowever in SearXNG it just shows
https://searxng.world/search
Which I don’t have an issue with, however when you click on a link and then go back to the search results it would have no idea what you searched for as it’s not in the URL and show an error.
That aside, the UI is great. icons don’t swap around on you like Google or have annoying popups about ‘privacy’ like DDG. On the topic of search results, it was good enough for me. Not great but then again there aren’t any good search engines right now.
i get a lot of simpsons pictures in the image results for some rsn
Some raisin
Some resin
same here but with hentai on searx.be
have been using it for a while on my mobile and so far i like it better than ddg or startpage
If you are on a desktop, you can run it locally, you are much less likely to be rate limited, but this comes at cost of your ip being still visible to google or whatever search engine you choose to scrape from
IP addresses are not some super-secret PII. You don’t have to try to hide it unless you don’t want to reveal the country you’re in. You can also proxy SearXNG through tor. Though Google wouldn’t work then, and of course search time increases as well.
It’s your queries + your IP combined with the rest of the data the net collects from you that identifies you.
Your IP is waay down the list on the fingerprint vector. Go to fingerprint.com, connect to a VPN, hard refresh the page. They’ll know you’re the same person. Nobody uses IP to fingerprint people. SearXNG mitigates a lot of the things that they actually use.
I completely agree with you, and what i wrote was in haste, essentially, what i wanted to say, was that an individual running searxng does not provide the anonymity benefits you would get by using some public instance, but it it still better because you are not directly using google or whatever website, and now searxng kinda acts like a browser between you and them, which does limited conversation - there aren’t any js based fingerprinting. I also use searxng locally, i cant stand the constant rate limiting of public servers, or sometimes only a few engines are blocked, and variation in result quality is unacceptable to me. I just wanted to add that bit for transparency,
I really wish there was a privacy oriented search engine with decent search results …
At this point, I just wish there was a search engine with decent results …
I checked it out, but most of the public instances I looked at use google + bing. I think I only came across one that used Mojeek, but they deranked it so google results were still at the top.
Yeah you can customize them – if you never clear your cookies.
Pretty much need to self-host it to customize it.
if you never clear your cookies.
They allow you to use a link instead for saving settings, which can also be used to set as your default search engine
I’m not seeing that option anywhere. Nor does it allow me to change the “weight”. I found a github discussion saying it should show up after you save the settings, but I tried that on two instances and didn’t get any unique URL.
Ah, I found it under the “cookies” tab. Needs to be more obvious IMO.
Does it have a widget? I want to integrate it in my workflow on my phone
Yeah, the chrome one will convert.
Oh? I tried on Vanadium and Brave (no way I’m using Chrome) and all I have is the option to “web app” it.
Can you share the steps you used?
I couldn’t figure out a way in Brave, it won’t let you set a custom URL for the default browser. Firefox allowed it to just change the customer browser link in the format of
Couldn’t find an APK to test vanadium, I assume it may be exclusive to GrapheneOS? (I just called it test for this, so name it something you’ll recognize in a few months)
Once the Default browser is changed in Firefox/chrome, their widgets pull that information from the app, so it just searches that way.
Oh, sweet. Thanks so much. It worked in Vanadium.
The best thing is to self host it, to have better uptimes and custom default settings
