My latest Google search replacement recently made a decision that basically forces me to turn off ad block in order to click results. I was wondering if there was any self hosted solution that is fairly easy to deploy in TrueNAS scale or if it is even worth doing. Bonus points if it’s federated somehow. I’ll deal with bad results if it needs time to grow as a project.
I also want to add that what little self hosting I’ve done so far has felt like cutting out a festering cancer and it feels so good to be in control of my online life again. Thanks so much for the guidance since the Rexxit. Finding out that you could easily self host a Reddit replacement with other people was what got me going to into this to begin with.
I noted in another comment that SearXNG can’t do anything about the trackers that your browser can’t do, and solving this at the browser level is a much better solution, because it protects you everywhere, rather than just on the search engine.
Routing over Tor is similar. Yes, you can route the search from your SearXNG instance to Google (or whatever upstream engine) over Tor, and hide your identity from Google. But then you click a link, and your IP connects to the IP of whatever site the results link to, and your ISP sees that. Knowing where you land can tell your ISP a lot about what you searched for. And the site you connected to knows your IP, so they get even more information - they know every action you took on the site, and everything you viewed. If you want to protect all of that, you should just use Tor on your computer, and protect every connection.
This is the same argument for using Signal vs WhatsApp - yes, in WhatsApp the conversation may be E2E encrypted, but the metadata about who you’re chatting with, for how long, etc is all still very valuable to Meta.
To reiterate/clarify what I’ve said elsewhere, I’m not making the case that people shouldn’t use SearXNG at all, only that their privacy claims are overstated, and if your goal is privacy, all the levels of security you would apply to SearXNG should be applied at your device level: Use a browser/extension to block trackers, use Tor to protect all your traffic, etc.