• KarnaOP
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    4 days ago

    You may self-host SearxNG (via Docker) and avoid direct interaction with search engines - be it google, bing, Brave or DDG.

    SearxNG will act as a privacy front-end for you.

    https://github.com/searxng/searxng

    • apis@beehaw.org
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      4 days ago

      Have tried out SearxNG without self-hosting, via different instances, but had to abandon it as it is way, way beyond my mental capabilities to get it to work.

      I doubt I could manage to self-host, having looked into Docker for some other matter.

      Using Mojeek currently, which isn’t great but not too terrible.

      • KarnaOP
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        4 days ago

        Though it is an off-topic but what exact issues you faced with SearxNG?

        • apis@beehaw.org
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          4 days ago

          Well, it worked initially, then more often than not my searches produced no results or confusing error messages.

          Experimented a lot with the SearxNG settings, and also with my browser and firewall settings in case there was some issue there, and eventually gave up.

          I was unable to find information online about the issues I experienced, in part because I had no idea how to describe them in order to find help.

          Think I tried it in three different browsers, over the course of a month or so, but primarily in Firefox.

          • KarnaOP
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            4 days ago

            To be honest, I never tried publicly available instances of any privacy front-ends (SearxNG, Nitter, Redlib etc.). I always self-host and route all such traffic via VPN.

            My initial issue with SearxNG was with the default selection of search engines. Default inclusion of Qwant engine caused irrelevant and non-english results to return. Currently my selection is limited to Google, Bing and Brave as DDG takes around 2 sec to return result (based on the VPN server location I’m using).

            If you still remember the error messages, I might help to help fix that.