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

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    Can someone explain the meaning of the name and the people building this project please?

    You’re trusting how information is filtered and funneled to you with a search tool, but a change to take lightly. Google sucks, but they have a lot to lose, a lot of eyes on them and I know generally their base motivations.

    • boonhet@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      7 months ago

      Fortunately, you can read through the source code of SearxNG and even modify it - provided that you also publish the modified version to your users if you host it publicly.

      You can run your own instance, public or private. Or you can use a public instance.

      Internally, it uses other search engines, rather than crawling the entire web and indexing everything.

  • Kaiyo@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    7 months ago

    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

    • Steve@communick.news
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      edit-2
      7 months ago

      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.

      • Mojeek Search Engine@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        7 months ago

        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

        • Eugenia@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          7 months ago

          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.

            • notfromhere@lemmy.ml
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              7 months ago

              Is that legally binding? What happens of they catch you, ban your IPs then you’re in the same situation as now. Literally no reason to not do it IMO.

              • Mojeek Search Engine@lemmy.ml
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                0
                ·
                7 months ago

                IP already hits a wall, also better to not get a reputation as a bad bot, it’s taken a while to get known for being friendly and respecting rules, to us you should follow robots

                • notfromhere@lemmy.ml
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  0
                  ·
                  7 months ago

                  I seem to recall creative ways to index things without robots, e.g. browser addon that users opt into to send pages and such, essentially crowdsourcing the indexing. Anyways good to see you’re taking the high road!

        • pinkystew@reddthat.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          7 months ago

          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?

        • Steve@communick.news
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          edit-2
          7 months ago

          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.

    • ColdWater@lemmy.caOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      edit-2
      7 months ago

      You can use Mojeek with SearX Nvm with nothing enabled but Mojeek returned no results, I wonders why is that?

      • ColdWater@lemmy.caOP
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        edit-2
        7 months ago

        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 results

    • JustMarkov@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      edit-2
      7 months ago

      Mojeek is cool, but trying to search something in my first language results in 0 results find.

  • TriflingToad@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    6 months ago

    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=web

    However 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.

  • ben_dover@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    7 months ago

    have been using it for a while on my mobile and so far i like it better than ddg or startpage

  • sga@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    7 months ago

    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

  • username@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    Español
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    I’d use it if its public instances didn’t get rate-limited so often

  • Anon518@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    7 months ago

    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.

    • helpmyusernamewontfi@lemmy.today
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      7 months ago

      if you never clear your cookies.

      They allow you to use a link instead for saving settings, which can also be used to set as your default search engine

      • Anon518@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        7 months ago

        I’m not seeing that option anywhere. Nor does it allow me to change the “weight”. I found a github discussion saying it should show up after you save the settings, but I tried that on two instances and didn’t get any unique URL.

        Ah, I found it under the “cookies” tab. Needs to be more obvious IMO.

  • Matt@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    7 months ago

    Dig out old PC from somewhere, install some Linux distribution, Tailscale and Docker/Podman, and install SearX that way.

  • Shareni@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    7 months ago

    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.

        • ikidd@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          7 months ago

          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.

    • RBG@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      edit-2
      7 months ago

      I use this daily and just wanted to highlight two downsides:

      • 1 some instances are quite slow in response

      • 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.

      • youmaynotknow@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        7 months ago

        Oh? I tried on Vanadium and Brave (no way I’m using Chrome) and all I have is the option to “web app” it.

        Can you share the steps you used?

        • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          edit-2
          7 months ago

          I couldn’t figure out a way in Brave, it won’t let you set a custom URL for the default browser. Firefox allowed it to just change the customer browser link in the format of

          Couldn’t find an APK to test vanadium, I assume it may be exclusive to GrapheneOS? (I just called it test for this, so name it something you’ll recognize in a few months)

          Once the Default browser is changed in Firefox/chrome, their widgets pull that information from the app, so it just searches that way.

  • Mandy@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    7 months ago

    Man, i wish i had the same experiencr

    The couple of times I tried it out, the search results where barely accurate