Google pays Mozilla to be default on Firefox. They are currently in a 3 year contract for it. In fact, this is a major source of income for Firefox and not having this deal would cripple Firefox.
Because it’s not yet a very mature and well-known project and there are a lot of different instances ran by different people that get frequently slow and CAPTCHA’ed by search engines when a lot of people use them. searx.me used to be the flagship instance, but it was shut down and replaced with a portal to other instances.
Developers encourage private self-hosting for these reasons, as well as to not have to trust other parties with your data. SearX still strips personal data anyway, and you could run it over Tor so you stay anonymous.
Is there even a way to get ff to recognize a searx instance as a search engine for the search bar? I couldn’t figure it out, so I just set one as a home page.
As far as I know, you have to use something like Add custom search engine extension. I am using SearX this way as a default search engine, and it works flawlessly.
Not necessary with SearX supporting OpenSearch. See @avalos@lemmy.ml’s comment below.
SearX supports OpenSearch, so if you enter the SearX instance, you can click the “Add SearX to search engines” (or something) button in the menu. You don’t need an extension.
Google pays Mozilla to be default on Firefox. They are currently in a 3 year contract for it. In fact, this is a major source of income for Firefox and not having this deal would cripple Firefox.
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Because it’s not yet a very mature and well-known project and there are a lot of different instances ran by different people that get frequently slow and CAPTCHA’ed by search engines when a lot of people use them. searx.me used to be the flagship instance, but it was shut down and replaced with a portal to other instances.
Developers encourage private self-hosting for these reasons, as well as to not have to trust other parties with your data. SearX still strips personal data anyway, and you could run it over Tor so you stay anonymous.
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I would suggest you to check out Librewolf https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/
Is there even a way to get ff to recognize a searx instance as a search engine for the search bar? I couldn’t figure it out, so I just set one as a home page.
I have used https://mycroftproject.com/
That looks actually really nice too. I knew this exists, but never got to look into it, to be honest. It might be the right time now, I suppose.
It was recognized at one point but then ff updated and removed that function. Worst day
As far as I know, you have to use something like Add custom search engine extension. I am using SearX this way as a default search engine, and it works flawlessly.Not necessary with SearX supporting OpenSearch. See @avalos@lemmy.ml’s comment below.
SearX supports OpenSearch, so if you enter the SearX instance, you can click the “Add SearX to search engines” (or something) button in the menu. You don’t need an extension.
That is entirely new to me. I read a bit about OpenSearch, but didn’t realize how it can be used. Thanks for the information.
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That didn’t work for me, searx homepage would open but it would not run the query. This is how I solved it:
~ about:config
browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh = true
~ about:preferences#search - Add
engine name = searx
engine URL = https:///search?q=%s
engine alias = @s
Google pays ff to use google shit has main search provider, use duckduckgo
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Linux?
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ah ok. On some linux distros duckduckgo is the default one on ff, on android it’s google you need to change it on definitions