The instances that give the best results seem to also get throttled pretty often on the source search engines, to the point of near uselessness.
Thinking of hosting my own, but the maintenance seems pretty involved according to the docs.
What’s your experience been like?
Self hosting and the maintenance is painless, but the results have been pretty terrible lately
Is it still worth it though? Nice username btw lel
Lol, thanks. I think it’s still worth it if you want more ownership over your searches, but just expect some rough edges
Why terrible?
Recently I’ll often get results that aren’t at all related to what I searched for. I also get a lot of timeouts from the upstream search engines, and sometimes I get results that are in Chinese for some reason
IIRC these are related to Bing misbehaving. There should be an ooen issue about that. Try deactivating it in preferences flash a workaround.
There’s an open issue about this on github. It’s the remote API is only recognising the first word of your query.
This has been bugging me too.
The timeouts are because the engines are presenting captchas. There’s a work around whereby you use your instance as a proxy, navigate to that remote engine, and do the captcha.
These two issues are a real pain in the ass so while I do presently have a searxng instance I’ve been using qwant the last few weeks because I’m just over it.
Interesting.