this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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Privacy

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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

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[–] Dyskolos 1 points 46 minutes ago

Using it on my own server since... Ages ☺️ Can only recommend it. Even though google's results are often... Weird up to completely unhelpful.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

I use ononoki for almost a half year without effort.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 52 minutes ago (1 children)

What if you want to use the computer for something other than Google searching?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 37 minutes ago

Install the other stuff on it

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours 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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

I'd use it if its public instances didn't get rate-limited so often

[–] [email protected] 39 points 21 hours ago (5 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 51 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 48 minutes 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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

Reddit doesn't allow us to crawl: https://www.reddit.com/robots.txt

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

The homepage took 5 seconds to load. I'll pass.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Let me tell you about waiting for AskJeeves to load up in the 90s.

Web crawler indeed

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

not sure what's happening there for you, speed is one of the things which people frequently say we do well for

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 hours ago

Not at all for me

[–] [email protected] 12 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

Mojeek is cool, but trying to search something in my first language results in 0 results find.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

which language are we talking?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 21 hours ago

Mojeek reminds me of early Google results which only searches title and inurl I like it

[–] [email protected] 4 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

~~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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

qwant is bing, mainly

[–] [email protected] 6 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

i get a lot of simpsons pictures in the image results for some rsn

[–] [email protected] 4 points 14 hours ago

same here but with hentai on searx.be

[–] [email protected] 3 points 16 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

It's your queries + your IP combined with the rest of the data the net collects from you that identifies you.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago

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,

[–] [email protected] 3 points 16 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 21 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

How is it compared to DDG?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

I never use DDG before, but I think it's pretty similar since DDG and SearX index their results from Bing (SearX and also index from Google, qwant... if you enable them), but SearX is decentralized and open source but DDG at core is not, you also have to trust DDG with your info (who know? maybe they lie about their privacy policy but I hope not)

[–] kekmacska 1 points 20 hours ago

a lot more search results, but they are ordered in a very weird way. it lists subdomains first, then the main domain

[–] [email protected] 4 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 15 hours ago

Could you elaborate on what you mean by that?