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
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.
As someone who hosts an instance, news to me lol
Edit: Developer says this can’t be done currently? Reddit comment
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+picturesIf 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.
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.
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.
Why wouldn’t you use Kagi?
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.
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
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)
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!
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.
Set it to do get requests rather than post.
