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
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.
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
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.
Well my instance’s logs are sent to null for this reason already, but thank you for the info!
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.
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
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Not at all for me
not sure what’s happening there for you, speed is one of the things which people frequently say we do well for
Let me tell you about waiting for AskJeeves to load up in the 90s.
Web crawler indeed
Mojeek is cool, but trying to search something in my first language results in 0 results find.
which language are we talking?
You can use Mojeek with SearXNvm with nothing enabled but Mojeek returned no results, I wonders why is that?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 resultsqwant is bing, mainly
Mojeek reminds me of early Google results which only searches title and inurl I like it
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)
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?
We make money from our API, what they’re referencing is a beta ads programme which was running
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!
have been using it for a while on my mobile and so far i like it better than ddg or startpage
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
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It’s your queries + your IP combined with the rest of the data the net collects from you that identifies you.
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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,
i get a lot of simpsons pictures in the image results for some rsn
Some raisin
Some resin
same here but with hentai on searx.be
I’d use it if its public instances didn’t get rate-limited so often
I really wish there was a privacy oriented search engine with decent search results …
At this point, I just wish there was a search engine with decent results …
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.
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
I’m not seeing that option anywhere. Nor does it allow me to change the “weight”. I found a github discussion saying it should show up after you save the settings, but I tried that on two instances and didn’t get any unique URL.
Ah, I found it under the “cookies” tab. Needs to be more obvious IMO.
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.
Dig out old PC from somewhere, install some Linux distribution, Tailscale and Docker/Podman, and install SearX that way.
What if you want to use the computer for something other than Google searching?
Install the other stuff on it
The best thing is to self host it, to have better uptimes and custom default settings
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)
Kagi works great for me. 100% worth it, best engine I’ve tried.
From what i understand, you need an account to use that, dosn’t seem very private.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
Shit. There’s no follow button in Lemmy. Finally someone that brings up a good point.
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.
4get.ca has been great for me.
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.
