Self-hosted isn’t as unstable because you don’t end up getting blocked by throttling as often if you’re the only user. Public instances tend to get hammered by bots and LLMs these days. Just put it behind a reverse proxy with a login or a VPN to keep others out. I use keycloak SSO in Traefik on a VPS, but pangolin works well for my web apps in my home. That said, it requires setup and maintenance. But no tracking since you own the server.
But TBH no generalized search engines are really good these days. They all mostly all overrun either by monetization schemes and ads or have been manipulated by SEO, so rarely give good results. I’ve been exploring lots of alternatives, but not many are any good.
What do you mean no tracking since you own your own server? If you use it alone, there is a straightforward correlation between the requests from your searxng instance and you, the dude who hosts it. The idea of searxng is that requests of many people become mixed together through an instance
Yes, but no identification to tie that to. Sure they know the things some individual happens to search for, but they don’t have my google login or advertising ID or Facebook token or any other tracking tokens to link those requests to my identity outside of that silo of the IP address, and that changes as it’s sent over an anonymizing proxy. It’s not perfect and if they really tried they could probably track it down, but it’s rare enough and enough obfuscation that I doubt they’d care enough to do it.
It used to be amazing, but lately the providers seem to have started fighting it. It’s take a while to get it setup correctly, especially if you want not only US results.
Searx is not the easy one. Many instances don’t work, and the working ones hardly show relevant results.
Self-hosted isn’t as unstable because you don’t end up getting blocked by throttling as often if you’re the only user. Public instances tend to get hammered by bots and LLMs these days. Just put it behind a reverse proxy with a login or a VPN to keep others out. I use keycloak SSO in Traefik on a VPS, but pangolin works well for my web apps in my home. That said, it requires setup and maintenance. But no tracking since you own the server.
But TBH no generalized search engines are really good these days. They all mostly all overrun either by monetization schemes and ads or have been manipulated by SEO, so rarely give good results. I’ve been exploring lots of alternatives, but not many are any good.
What do you mean no tracking since you own your own server? If you use it alone, there is a straightforward correlation between the requests from your searxng instance and you, the dude who hosts it. The idea of searxng is that requests of many people become mixed together through an instance
Yes, but no identification to tie that to. Sure they know the things some individual happens to search for, but they don’t have my google login or advertising ID or Facebook token or any other tracking tokens to link those requests to my identity outside of that silo of the IP address, and that changes as it’s sent over an anonymizing proxy. It’s not perfect and if they really tried they could probably track it down, but it’s rare enough and enough obfuscation that I doubt they’d care enough to do it.
It used to be amazing, but lately the providers seem to have started fighting it. It’s take a while to get it setup correctly, especially if you want not only US results.
Yeah I have not enjoyed it