actually awesome and fast search engine (depending on which instance you use) with no trashy AI and ADs results also great for privacy, if you don’t know which instance to use go to https://searx.space/ and choose an instance closest to you
I mean it’s often better than nothing, but it is a meta search that still often uses Google or Bing to gather results. IMHO, cut off the need for that data on the whole and use an option like Mojeek
For all their talk of doing things different with their own index and rankings. Mojeek is following exactly what Google did. It’s still an ad based business model that makes users into products to be sold to advertisers. They’re good now, while still trying to build market share. But once their investors get hungry, the enshitification will commence.
we make money mainly from our api, our investors are patient private capital and we don’t take vc, appreciate your point but these are fundamentally different situations, our ads (when they run) will also be contextual so more of a ddg situation than a “makes users into products to be sold to advertisers”
fair enough if it’s not for you though
I don’t know if the comparison is inaccurate.
You make money from advertising to your users (“ddg situation” notwithstanding), are beholden to your investors (private status notwithstanding) and need to see more users to increase revenue. The person above you is saying that this model is what will drive you to eventually be as bad as Google. Do you understand?
We make money from our API, what they’re referencing is a beta ads programme which was running
Do you have topics that are censored? I searched for my reddit post “what I’ve learnt from the mantis aliens”, and it does not show up in your results. Neither at google’s. But it does on other search engines. The ufo/alien stuff are censored in most search engines, while there isn’t a reason to be. That is how I judge search engines. And Mojeek doesn’t give me the results I asked for.
Reddit doesn’t allow us to crawl: https://www.reddit.com/robots.txt
API index access is an important difference.
If it was only that, without public facing ad driven search, I’d be more impressed.Maybe if you removed the adds, and severely rate limited your own public facing search, so it’s more of a demo than an actual service. This would force you to solely make money off the API access, without directly competing against those customers.
That would be an honest buisness model. One that doesn’t turn users into eyeballs for advertising. Which seems to me, to be the most insidious problem of the modern internet.
Agree to disagree here, but I’ll refer to Cory Doctorow for a contextual vs behavioral/tracking ads comparison, one which is very good: https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#contextual-ads (applied to the media, but the general thread is relevant)
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which language are we talking?
Mojeek reminds me of early Google results which only searches title and inurl I like it
You can use Mojeek with SearXNvm with nothing enabled but Mojeek returned no results, I wonders why is that?I could be wrong but didn’t Mojeek also index results from Google and Bing?I’m wrong they index their own results, I mean Qwant is a search engine built in EU and they index their own resultsqwant is bing, mainly
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Not at all for me
not sure what’s happening there for you, speed is one of the things which people frequently say we do well for
Let me tell you about waiting for AskJeeves to load up in the 90s.
Web crawler indeed
Man, i wish i had the same experiencr
The couple of times I tried it out, the search results where barely accurate
Try kagi. It’s paid at $5/mo., but you get 300 searches to try it out.
I’d use it if its public instances didn’t get rate-limited so often
Been rocking self-hosted Searxng for the last 3 weeks now as my default search engine; it’s as good or better than DDG and certainly better than Google. Results I need are usually within the first three items, no extraneous shit.
I thought I’d just try it out, but it’s staying. The ability to tune the background engines is awesome. My search history is private (though I wasn’t that worried about DDG, there was no way in fuck I was using Kagi) since it’s running it’s searches via a VPN and returning me results locally.
it’s as good or better than
It’s only as good as the search engines you select. Which ones have you selected?
Defaults are working fine, I might have added one or two.
What does it default to? Google+bing+DDG?
Keep in mind that to protect your privacy you should also share your instance with others. All the searches are still linked to an IP which can be abused as well.
Yes, that’s the purpose of the VPN. It’s out there mixed in with everyone else that’s using that exit node.
Honestly, it’s not too much of a concern to me, I’m not doing anything illegal or naughty, it’s just making sure I’m not part of the dataset.
Yep, a VPN is a good solution.
How does it work self hosting? Is it querying other search engines or just maintaining a database on your server?
It’s a meta search engine: it aggregates results from multiple sources for your search query. So yes, it queries other search engines.
Its all calls to other engines, that you can choose and tune. So its making those calls and filtering out shit like AI results, and then ranking it to return back to you. Seems to do a good job.
How is it compared to DDG?
I never use DDG before, but I think it’s pretty similar since DDG and SearX index their results from Bing (SearX and also index from Google, qwant… if you enable them), but SearX is decentralized and open source but DDG at core is not, you also have to trust DDG with your info (who know? maybe they lie about their privacy policy but I hope not)
In terms of search results, ddg sometimes will find very specific searches better and has more bells and whistles. I still prefer SearXNG, and have been using my instance almost exclusively since setting it up.
a lot more search results, but they are ordered in a very weird way. it lists subdomains first, then the main domain
it’s like using google from 2000’s; thanks for sharing
If you set it as your default search in chrome or such, it will convert the Google search bar in Android to a SearXNG search bar. I started using it a little while back. Firefox never did well for me on Android (I’m sure it’s anecdotal)
i get a lot of simpsons pictures in the image results for some rsn
same here but with hentai on searx.be
I checked it out, but most of the public instances I looked at use google + bing. I think I only came across one that used Mojeek, but they deranked it so google results were still at the top.
Yeah you can customize them – if you never clear your cookies.
Pretty much need to self-host it to customize it.
If you are on a desktop, you can run it locally, you are much less likely to be rate limited, but this comes at cost of your ip being still visible to google or whatever search engine you choose to scrape from
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It’s your queries + your IP combined with the rest of the data the net collects from you that identifies you.
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I completely agree with you, and what i wrote was in haste, essentially, what i wanted to say, was that an individual running searxng does not provide the anonymity benefits you would get by using some public instance, but it it still better because you are not directly using google or whatever website, and now searxng kinda acts like a browser between you and them, which does limited conversation - there aren’t any js based fingerprinting. I also use searxng locally, i cant stand the constant rate limiting of public servers, or sometimes only a few engines are blocked, and variation in result quality is unacceptable to me. I just wanted to add that bit for transparency,
It’s ok at best, when it works. When it runs out of API hits for the day at noon, you need to use something like https://searx.neocities.org/ and retype your search multiple times until you manage to hit an instance that can actually perform a search.
Also, no suggestions.
Self host it, it’s nothing to set up.
Doesn’t that defeat the only benefit - anonymity?
Not if it runs the queries it sends out via a VPN where it mingles with thousands of other requests. An API call doesn’t have the disadvantages of browser fingerprinting, cookies, etc that are used to build a background of a user browsing to your search engine and track their searches. Also, there is no feedback to the search engine about which result you choose to use. If you allow outside users, it would further muddy the waters.
Ideally, you’d have it run random searches when not being used to further obfuscate the source.
It strips the tracking data to and from the engines, so if you tuck it behind a vpn, GG.
I use this daily and just wanted to highlight two downsides:
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1 some instances are quite slow in response
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2 some instances are non English, so everything except search results might be unreadable unless you know that language
The second one has been happening less frequently recently though, not sure if there are just more English instances or some other reason behind it.
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Kagi works great for me. 100% worth it, best engine I’ve tried.
Edit: If you are curious about their privacy policy https://kagi.com/privacy.
From what i understand, you need an account to use that, dosn’t seem very private.
That’s a fair point. The whole point of needing an account and paying for the service is that personal data plays no role in their business model. This requieres trust from their users but I’m willing to do so as fuck google (obv) and ddg and other alternatives I’ve tried give noticeable worse results…
It’s pretty nice. The REST API for running searches makes running SearxNG worth it, if nothing else.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by that?
I stopped using it not because of the results but because you couldn’t swipe back without it sending you to the base website.
On DuckDuckGo (and google n others) a search is shown in the URL like looking for frog:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=frog&t=fpas&ia=webHowever in SearXNG it just shows
https://searxng.world/search
Which I don’t have an issue with, however when you click on a link and then go back to the search results it would have no idea what you searched for as it’s not in the URL and show an error.
That aside, the UI is great. icons don’t swap around on you like Google or have annoying popups about ‘privacy’ like DDG. On the topic of search results, it was good enough for me. Not great but then again there aren’t any good search engines right now.
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have been using it for a while on my mobile and so far i like it better than ddg or startpage
