How many of you have tried using SearXNG? It’s a meta search engine that pull data from a number of sources before ranking and displaying them. I really like the cached feature that tries to load the internet archive copy of the page.
I got a private instance going a few months ago and I really like it. It’s just a little slow cause it runs on a Pi (my only 24/7 device at the moment). The hostname rewrite feature is cool and I’ll have to check out the archive cache feature.
I also use a public instance at work and it’s way more effective than the bloated corporate search engines. Super handy for engine or language specific searches too.
I’ve been running a private instance for about a year as my main search engine and for a few friends. Really great results with the aggregation, simple to maintain, and have only had a couple issues where my IP got rate limited by one engine for a day or so.
It’s good and I use it but at the same time I have also noticed that specially Google results are sometimes absolutely bad compared to directly searching on Google, and I am talking so bad that it probably is on purpose.
But it’s fine because bangs will give you all the power
is there a list of bangs available? because i just tried a few and none worked
Everyone available in DuckDuckGo, just double bang it: !!yt
ah nice i didn’t know about the double bang, thank you
I just started using it due to a comment I saw on lemmy. I haven’t used it much but so far it seems good.
yeah, it is nice, for couple of users as long as search engines do not start to ratelimit you.
I host my own instance so rate limits aren’t much of an issue but if your looking at it for more privacy I wouldn’t recommend going down that path.
Just a few days ago I had commented elsewhere that, disappointed with recent Brave Search results, I should have used a meta search engine instead. Thanks to your post I stopped procrastinating and started trying a SearXNG instance as default search engine (just tweaking engine settings a bit), so far everything seems good, results are on point and in multiple languages (last time I had tried a meta search engine a few years ago I had to change manually the language for each search, and it was annoying given that I often search the web in at least three languages, sometimes four) and the uncluttered UI is very nice. I’ll test it out for a few days I guess, but the first impression is good.
Spun up the container about a week ago. Made it my default search in Firefox. So far I’ve been happy with the quality of the results although I will admit there is a perceptible lag when submitting searches, compared to google/bing/etc… I imagine that’s mostly to do with the fact that it’s waiting on multiple search engines to fill my request.
I do like it so far. I figure with some tuning I could get the response time down.
it’s great :3
I just started using it recently. It’s pretty good. I like that it doesn’t try to sell me a bunch of shit.
I really tried to love it. I tweaked a lot of settings but i never quite got the results i wanted. I still have a selfhosted instance running for occasional use. But i mainly use DuckDuckGo now.
In my experience SearX is the search engine that gives the best result for me once configurated to my liking, even beating google ( by getting some of google’s results ). The only downside is that sometimes the instances I use are down and I have to use another.
I used it for like 2 years, even hosted an instance myself just for myself. But I moved away from it recently because some problems were never fixed: Searches often return 0 results because of timeouts of the selected search engines and (often, not always) a bad order of the search results.
I use SearXNG since half a year or so I think. It can be a little bit slow at times and some source engines will be deactivated temporarily. But overall its good enough for my daily use. I don’t search the web too often anyway and often use the search on the services webpage directly (Steam, Wikipedia or other stuff in example). One can default to SearXNG and in some cases use DuckDuckGo or Startpage (instead Google) for alternative results.
However sometimes an instance is offline temporarily or forever (but never tested after forever, so not sure about that). In those cases I have to switch to a different instance in Firefox default search engine, which I have bookmarked a few to choose from. So be prepared.
