if you looking for a good alternative for google search, try "SearXNG"

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
Mojeek is cool, but trying to search something in my first language results in 0 results find.
- which language are we talking?
Mojeek reminds me of early Google results which only searches title and inurl I like it
~~You can use Mojeek with SearX~~ Nvm 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 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
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+pictures
  
  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.
- 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.
- 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
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).

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.

btw

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

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 as good or better than

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.
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.
How does it work self hosting? Is it querying other search engines or just maintaining a database on your server?
- 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.
- It's a meta search engine: it aggregates results from multiple sources for your search query. So yes, it queries other search engines.

How is it compared to DDG?

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)
a lot more search results, but they are ordered in a very weird way. it lists subdomains first, then the main domain
In terms of search results, ddg sometimes will find very specific searches better and has more bells and whistles. I still prefer SearXNG, and have been using my instance almost exclusively since setting it up.

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

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

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.

Self host it, it's nothing to set up.
- Doesn't that defeat the only benefit - anonymity?
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.

Did anyone else not know Lycos was still around? Lycos is still around. Seems not that bad. No AI stuff.

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've been pretty happy with Kagi and they have a decent privacy policy: https://kagi.com/privacy

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.

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

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.

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.

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

4get.ca has been great for me.

The best thing is to self host it, to have better uptimes and custom default settings

I use ononoki for almost a half year without effort.

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.

Whoogle is a good option for self hosting as well

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

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?
No widget. You can make it into a web app though.

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.

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...
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.
- 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.