The instances that give the best results seem to also get throttled pretty often on the source search engines, to the point of near uselessness.
Thinking of hosting my own, but the maintenance seems pretty involved according to the docs.
What’s your experience been like?
Edit: all right y’all, thanks for the feedback. I’m going to spin up an instance.
Hey, I know you got a ton of replies but yeah, been using searXNG with a custom theme made by me and it’s basically identical to google (including the feeling lucky part lol)
Used it for months and it’s awesome, haven’t missed google at all.
The amazing thing about it is that with an instance of
meilisearchI was able to index all my media libraries/book libraries/game libraries and searching for!home <query>actually sarches within my home lab, which is a huge win for me.
Hope this helps give you an idea of how powerful this can be <3
I have been hosting multiple SearXNG instances, the newest one (https://マリウス.com/be-your-own-privacy-respecting-google-bing-brave/) being a private instance for my own community channel, and it has been relatively smooth sailing.
Some niche engines, like e.g. Mojeek seem to be notoriously slow, but that might also depend very much on the VPS that your requests are coming from.
If, however, big engines like Bing or Google are blocking/throttling you, it might be due to your IP/subnet reputation and it might be worth switching your host.
Alternatively, you could overengineer a setup in which you round-robin route your SearXNG request through a number of simultaneously running Wireguard tunnels from a VPN provider to obscure your traffic.
However, if my experience, most VPN providers suffer extremely from Cloudflare and ReCaptcha blocks, hence ymmv.
i been hosting my instance for a while its not on the main list but its still publicly accesible never had a issue with it
I’m running SearxNG as rootless docker container on my homelab for nearly 2 years now. I have connected it to Internet via VPN.
@BonkTheAnnoyed SearXNG has been my main search engine for about three years now, running on a local Yunohost.
Almost no maintenance.
The only annoyance I’ve had with it is searches will sometimes default to another language, even though I set the language to only return English results.
Also, I’ve found that the image/map search capabilities are less performant than googles.
But I still use it because the search results are so clean and no-frills.
Yes. I selfhost it. It’s pretty easy. All you need to know is that you occasionally need to merge your config with the original that is getting updated.
If you know how to use nvim diff mode, it’s trivial.
Its not that difficult, i have mine set up with gluetun and I’ve been using for more than 1 year now, sometimes i have some problem with the search terms and every engine gets broken but i just need to search with another name
Usually if this happens for me it’s an issue with the gluetun end, since all the big names love to throttle known VPNs. Fixes itself after a few minutes, but if I’m not feeling lazy a quick stack restart tends to fix it too.
I wish we have a free to use, open source, and privacy respecting search engine that do the crawling and indexing and don’t rely on other search engines.
Maybe we can utilize all selfhosted instances to do the crawling and consolidate it.
Oh wouldn’t that be sweet, a federated web crawler
Not saying it’s perfect but doesn’t Yacy do this?
How did I not know about it sooner.
Thank you!!
Can’t wait to use it. Id support them as much as I can.
I host it as a docker container and the maintenance has been painless
+1 to that. I started hosting it recently and haven’t even had to do anything about maintenance
Same here. Once in a while I update the config with all the changed engines. But that’s about it.
Self hosting and the maintenance is painless, but the results have been pretty terrible lately
Is it still worth it though? Nice username btw lel
Lol, thanks. I think it’s still worth it if you want more ownership over your searches, but just expect some rough edges
Why terrible?
Recently I’ll often get results that aren’t at all related to what I searched for. I also get a lot of timeouts from the upstream search engines, and sometimes I get results that are in Chinese for some reason
IIRC these are related to Bing misbehaving. There should be an ooen issue about that. Try deactivating it in preferences flash a workaround.
There’s an open issue about this on github. It’s the remote API is only recognising the first word of your query.
This has been bugging me too.
The timeouts are because the engines are presenting captchas. There’s a work around whereby you use your instance as a proxy, navigate to that remote engine, and do the captcha.
These two issues are a real pain in the ass so while I do presently have a searxng instance I’ve been using qwant the last few weeks because I’m just over it.
Interesting.
I have deployed it using docker. But I am still having trouble setting it up with cloudflare and my domain.
Pretty easy to maintain, ive switched over to using my instance as a default search provider and works great.
I deployed it in a Docker container. It is my default search engine. I use it constantly. Besides Calibre & Navidrome, it’s one of my most heavily used, selfhosted apps.
Navidrome❤️
It is so undervalued for how amazing streaming your own music collection is.
It is so undervalued for how amazing streaming your own music collection is.
It is indeed. Even yesterday, I was in the kitchen making my ‘world famous’ Italian Seasoning bread with 7 natural herbs and spices. I have an old phone I use just for the WiFi, pulled up my Navidrome instance, set the phone up in the window sill, put my headphones on, and had a good time. I was even inspired to make some fudge.
spoiler
I just have it running in a docker container…
