GitHub - searxng/searxng: SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from various search services and databases. Users are neither tracked nor profiled.
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SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from various search services and databases. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. - searxng/searxng

Documentation: https://docs.searxng.org/index.html

I finally self host my own private instance of the meta search engine SearXNG. I did not install it manually, so there is not this deep understanding how it works or anything like that. But at least its compiled from source and runs on my local machine.

Thanks to the AUR script: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/searxng-git (View PKGBUILD install script) Now I can use the search engine in my web browser at the configured address. It was surprising easy and quick process (thanks to this script). There are other methods of installing too, official: https://docs.searxng.org/admin/installation.html

# Archlinux, AUR

# Build and install from source:
yay searxng-git

# Configure the search engine (shouldn't need to):
sudoedit /etc/searxng/settings.yml

# Start server when needed:
systemctl start searxng.service

# Or automatically start the server whenever you login:
systemctl enable searxng.service

This feels so good and liberating. Before that I was using DuckDuckGo, then tried Startpage and then used public instances of SearXNG. So I still had to trust them. The only downside is, that my IP is still known to any search engine I have enabled in SearXNG. I could enable Proton VPN for that, but I’m not enabling and disabling VPN each time I want to do a websearch.

The next logical step would be to have a dedicated server machine to run this (and possibly other servers) and access it from the web on any other computer I want to. But that is something I’m not getting into right now.

  • thingsiplay@lemmy.mlOP
    1·
    2 hours ago

    For me I was using SearXNG for years now, by rotating public instances. So this private one is basically the same, just private. The search results are really not great to be honest. That’s why I sometimes used other search engines back and forth, especially if the instance got blocked a lot or was no longer available. And a few times I still access Google directly, if the prior search results were nonsense. Most of the time the search results with SearXNG are satisfying enough for me that this is a non issue. I’m okay paying with a bit inconvenience or worse results. I’m not dependent too much on web search anyway.