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

  • Matt@lemmy.ml
    2·
    25 days ago

    Dig out old PC from somewhere, install some Linux distribution, Tailscale and Docker/Podman, and install SearX that way.

  • The Doctor@beehaw.orgEnglish
    4·
    26 days ago

    It’s pretty nice. The REST API for running searches makes running SearxNG worth it, if nothing else.

  • ben_dover@lemmy.ml
    3·
    25 days ago

    have been using it for a while on my mobile and so far i like it better than ddg or startpage

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      3·
      24 days ago

      If you set it as your default search in chrome or such, it will convert the Google search bar in Android to a SearXNG search bar. I started using it a little while back. Firefox never did well for me on Android (I’m sure it’s anecdotal)

  • Kaiyo@lemmy.world
    516·
    26 days ago

    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

    • Steve@communick.newsEnglish
      69·
      26 days ago

      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.

      • Mojeek Search Engine@lemmy.ml
        244·
        25 days ago

        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

        • Eugenia@lemmy.mlEnglish
          42·
          25 days ago

          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.

            • notfromhere@lemmy.ml
              12·
              24 days ago

              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.

              • Mojeek Search Engine@lemmy.ml
                2·
                24 days ago

                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

                • notfromhere@lemmy.ml
                  21·
                  24 days ago

                  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!

        • pinkystew@reddthat.comEnglish
          71·
          25 days ago

          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?

        • Steve@communick.newsEnglish
          4·
          25 days ago

          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.

    • ColdWater@lemmy.caOP
      4·
      26 days ago

      You can use Mojeek with SearX Nvm with nothing enabled but Mojeek returned no results, I wonders why is that?

      • ColdWater@lemmy.caOP
        21·
        26 days ago

        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 results

  • ad_on_is@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    25 days ago

    I have it running on my server, and honestly… I almost love it more than kagi. Still evaluating both, to make a decision by the end of the year.

  • OfficerBribe@lemm.ee
    212·
    25 days ago

    Aren’t all search queries available to whoever hosts an instance? In my eyes this is much worse to privacy and a much bigger risk unless you really know who is behind your chosen instance. I would trust some a company a bit more with safeguarding this information so it does not leak to some random guy.

    • sandwichsaregood@lemmy.world
      10·
      24 days ago

      I’ve always gotten the impression it was mostly intended to be self hosted. I’ve self hosted it for something like a couple years now, runs like a clock. It still strips out tracking and advertising, even if you don’t get the crowd anonymity of a public instance.

      • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
        2·
        24 days ago

        Self hosting doesn’t make sense as a privacy feature because then it’s still just you making requests to google/other SE

        • sandwichsaregood@lemmy.world
          2·
          24 days ago

          It’s not useless, it removes a lot of the tracking cookies and such and sponsored links loaded with telemetry. Theoretically you can also get the benefits of anonymity if you proxy through Tor or a VPN, which I originally tried to do but turns out Google at least blocks requests from Tor and at least the VPN endpoint I have and probably most of them. Google or whatever upstream SE can still track you by IP when you self host, but its tracking is going to much less without the extra telemetry cookies and tracking code it gets when you use Google results directly.

          But yes, practically you either have to trust the instance you’re using to some extent or give up some of the anonymity. I opted to self host and would recommend the same over using a public instance if you can, personally. And if privacy is your biggest concern, only use upstream search providers that are (or rather, claim to be) more privacy respecting like DDG or Qwant. My main use case is primarily as a better frontend to search without junk sponsored results and privacy is more of a secondary benefit.

          FWIW, they have a pretty detailed discussion on why they recommend self-hosting here.

      • Derp@lemmy.ml
        62·
        24 days ago

        A VPN will not save you, they are easily worse for privacy in terms of user tracking. It centralises your entire web traffic in a single place for the VPN provider to track (and potentially sell).

        • OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml
          2·
          24 days ago

          You either trust the ISP or a VPN. Its a tool not a blanket of protection. Opsec and knowing how to move is most important.

          • notprogrammer@programming.dev
            1·
            24 days ago

            But you pay more for what is essentially the same with a VPN. You have to buy a VPN subscription on top of your internet subscription, get less speed because your internet traffic is being routed through a different country and get no benefit to privacy. The only use case for a VPN is when you have to bypass georestrictions.

      • tooclose104@lemmy.ca
        23·
        24 days ago

        It doesn’t bother me one bit of you know my search history. You’ll learn I search a word to see if I know your to spell it properly and that I DIY a lot of stuff lol

      • OfficerBribe@lemm.ee
        3·
        24 days ago

        Thanks for clarification and great that this is not included in project, but couldn’t someone change the server side code and somehow see more info that goes through?

        I know there is that HTML check in https://searx.space/ to see if search interface code is not heavily modified, but on server side anything could go on.

        If requests are encrypted in a way that searxng does not see contents then it probably is not trivial to do, but there always is a possibility something clever could be done.

      • Derp@lemmy.ml
        6·
        24 days ago

        Of course it can be done, check your web server logs.

        If you are using GET requests to send search queries to searxng, what you searched for will show up in the logs as

        2024-10-31 123.321.0.100 /?query=kinky+furry+pictures

        If you use POST requests the server admin can also easily enable logging those.

        People hosting searxng can absolutely see what you searched for, along with your IP address, user agent string etc.

        • Mac@federation.redEnglish
          2·
          24 days ago

          Well my instance’s logs are sent to null for this reason already, but thank you for the info!

  • Anon518@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    52·
    25 days ago

    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.

    • helpmyusernamewontfi@lemmy.today
      4·
      25 days ago

      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

      • Anon518@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        24 days ago

        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.

  • Shareni@programming.dev
    4·
    25 days ago

    It’s ok at best, when it works. When it runs out of API hits for the day at noon, you need to use something like https://searx.neocities.org/ and retype your search multiple times until you manage to hit an instance that can actually perform a search.

    Also, no suggestions.

        • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
          61·
          25 days ago

          Not if it runs the queries it sends out via a VPN where it mingles with thousands of other requests. An API call doesn’t have the disadvantages of browser fingerprinting, cookies, etc that are used to build a background of a user browsing to your search engine and track their searches. Also, there is no feedback to the search engine about which result you choose to use. If you allow outside users, it would further muddy the waters.

          Ideally, you’d have it run random searches when not being used to further obfuscate the source.

    • RBG@discuss.tchncs.de
      2·
      24 days ago

      I use this daily and just wanted to highlight two downsides:

      • 1 some instances are quite slow in response

      • 2 some instances are non English, so everything except search results might be unreadable unless you know that language

      The second one has been happening less frequently recently though, not sure if there are just more English instances or some other reason behind it.