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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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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Whoogle is a good option for self hosting as well
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=web
However 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.
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it’s like using google from 2000’s; thanks for sharing
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)
I really wish there was a privacy oriented search engine with decent search results …
I’ve been pretty happy with Kagi and they have a decent privacy policy: https://kagi.com/privacy
At this point, I just wish there was a search engine with decent results …
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.
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.
Self hosting doesn’t make sense as a privacy feature because then it’s still just you making requests to google/other SE
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.
Companies are definitely selling your data. Use a VPN.
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).
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.
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.
As someone who hosts an instance, news to me lol
Edit: Developer says this can’t be done currently? Reddit comment
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.
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
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.
Well my instance’s logs are sent to null for this reason already, but thank you for the info!
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
Billions of Chinese also aren’t bothered that they live under surveillance, but it isn’t right.
Good thing it only happens to the Chinese…
Kagi works great for me. 100% worth it, best engine I’ve tried.
Edit: If you are curious about their privacy policy https://kagi.com/privacy.
5 dollars for 300 searches per month? Dafuk? And to top it up, need an actual account with email. Gets acquired in a couple of years, and all the data they gather on you gets sold. You’d be better off staying with Google.
The family plan (w/ unlimited searches) is better value. Also the whole point of charging upfront is that personal data plays no role on its business model. Ofc there’s still the risk of it being acquired but the userbase (even if small atm) is still growing and (allegedly) is now profitable.
Ok I need to put my tinfoil hat on for a moment but I think there is some viral marketing going on for it on Lemmy. The frequency I see it recommended or mentioned and the unorganic way it is brought up gives me advert vibes.
Lol as if that tiny company could afford that kind of stuff. Also what do you mean unorganic as the thread in question is talking about search engines? Ironically, I commented the kagi suggestion cause I barely never see it mentioned in these threads and I genuinely find it super cool and I’d like more people to try it… guess you can’t give suggestions anymore?
My intention is not to personally attack you just to get that out of the way. That is why I prefaced my statement with the tinfoil hat part.
I don’t know if the company can afford that. I did not look into it enough but I know that viral marketing is not a very expensive marketing strategy and I hate it.
I can speak only on my experience here on Lemmy where I hear it mentioned with a rather high frequency and in ways that suggest to me that it could be an advert.
I will not apologize for being sceptical when it comes to commercial product recommendations and I suggest everybody do the same as viral marketing is extremely widespread in the modern net.
Yeal I get it, I find it hard to rely on online recommendations too. But still, I find it funny that I personally haven’t seen any kagi comment and you have seen enough already to grow skeptical. Because of that, and because I have enjoyed using it, I wanted to share it. Could have gone deeper on the reasons I like it but it would sound more forced/advertisy imo (e.g. “For only xyz per month you get 100% private reliable results with xyz features. I have used it for xyz months and it has never failed” etc).
Still kinda annoying to get implied to be a bot/paid rando when sharing something cool but that’s the web
Edit: I took a second looks to other comments and I can see that kagi is indeed mentioned quite a bit so nvm that. I’m glad to hear more people are starting to use it now :)
It’s just a really good product. I search for something and get the results I’m looking for. You don’t have to like it, but I like the product enough that I would take the time to recommend that others give it a go too.
It could be a good product. I neither hate it nor like it.
I personally know someone in advertisement and viral marketing is more widespread than I think people realize. That is why I would like people to be sceptical about stuff that gets recommended with this kind of frequency (and IMHO with text in a tone that I’ve read in actual viral marketing campaigns) especially if the product is commercial.
This method of advertising is used because it works and as you can see by the backlash here merely suggesting that it could be an ad and asking people to be sceptical/cautious is taken as breaking a social taboo.
Shit. There’s no follow button in Lemmy. Finally someone that brings up a good point.
From what i understand, you need an account to use that, dosn’t seem very private.
That’s a fair point. The whole point of needing an account and paying for the service is that personal data plays no role in their business model. This requieres trust from their users but I’m willing to do so as fuck google (obv) and ddg and other alternatives I’ve tried give noticeable worse results…
Does it have a widget? I want to integrate it in my workflow on my phone
Yeah, the chrome one will convert.
Oh? I tried on Vanadium and Brave (no way I’m using Chrome) and all I have is the option to “web app” it.
Can you share the steps you used?
I couldn’t figure out a way in Brave, it won’t let you set a custom URL for the default browser. Firefox allowed it to just change the customer browser link in the format of
Couldn’t find an APK to test vanadium, I assume it may be exclusive to GrapheneOS? (I just called it test for this, so name it something you’ll recognize in a few months)
Once the Default browser is changed in Firefox/chrome, their widgets pull that information from the app, so it just searches that way.
Oh, sweet. Thanks so much. It worked in Vanadium.
No widget. You can make it into a web app though.
Can someone explain the meaning of the name and the people building this project please?
You’re trusting how information is filtered and funneled to you with a search tool, but a change to take lightly. Google sucks, but they have a lot to lose, a lot of eyes on them and I know generally their base motivations.
Fortunately, you can read through the source code of SearxNG and even modify it - provided that you also publish the modified version to your users if you host it publicly.
You can run your own instance, public or private. Or you can use a public instance.
Internally, it uses other search engines, rather than crawling the entire web and indexing everything.
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?
Because I don’t want a direct link to payment information and my search history stored and sold later.
It’s only as good as the search engines you select. Which ones have you selected?
Defaults are working fine, I might have added one or two.
What does it default to? Google+bing+DDG?
Keep in mind that to protect your privacy you should also share your instance with others. All the searches are still linked to an IP which can be abused as well.
Yes, that’s the purpose of the VPN. It’s out there mixed in with everyone else that’s using that exit node.
Honestly, it’s not too much of a concern to me, I’m not doing anything illegal or naughty, it’s just making sure I’m not part of the dataset.
Yep, a VPN is a good solution.
How does it work self hosting? Is it querying other search engines or just maintaining a database on your server?
It’s a meta search engine: it aggregates results from multiple sources for your search query. So yes, it queries other search engines.
Its all calls to other engines, that you can choose and tune. So its making those calls and filtering out shit like AI results, and then ranking it to return back to you. Seems to do a good job.
Man, i wish i had the same experiencr
The couple of times I tried it out, the search results where barely accurate
Try kagi. It’s paid at $5/mo., but you get 300 searches to try it out.
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.
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.
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.
Self host it, it’s nothing to set up.
Doesn’t that defeat the only benefit - anonymity?
It strips the tracking data to and from the engines, so if you tuck it behind a vpn, GG.
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.
The best thing is to self host it, to have better uptimes and custom default settings
Did anyone else not know Lycos was still around? Lycos is still around. Seems not that bad. No AI stuff.
4get.ca has been great for me.