Searx – A privacy-respecting, hackable metasearch engine | Hacker News Reader

Searx – A privacy-respecting, hackable metasearch engine

github.com

129 pointsteddet27 comments

I've just posted about this in the thread about Peekier, I've been hosting my own instance behind a vpn for quite sometime and am really happy with the search results. It supports a great amount of search engines, even yacy (the complete decentralized search machine) and shows even support for duckduckgo instant answers, though that seems to be very work in progress for now.

Surely this isn't as great as yacy would be in theory (the results currently are usually very bad) and isn't really future proof as if this gets too many requests, google and the rest would definitely do something against it, but for now it's pretty decent.

What are the pros to keep running your own instance rather than using an existing public one ?

You know there's nothing dodgy running in addition to the software. When there's a public instance, the connection could be terminated by (say) an Nginx reverse proxy that sends your traffic to a log.

In short, you have no trust on public instances. Check the documentation for details: https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/user/own-instance.html

On that note, i wonder if you could build a secondary search engine at your home, but only index a small part of the web you typically use?

This immediately sounds useless, but for me i feel[1] like i primarily search a handful of sites. If i can index the sites i mainly care about, and fallback to "normal" engines automatically or with a flag, then for the queries i care about suddenly i get 100% accurate[2] and 100% private searches.

This seems like a good idea to me. My only question, is how much bandwidth and storage are needed to even index something like reddit? If it's too much to run on a moderate home computer, then what's the use?

[1]: I don't have any data to back up this claim, though. Purely a hunch. [2]: edit, well i guess 100% accurate depends on the search implementation, but it's still 100% private :)

Maybe a private instance of a cloud-based server paid for by like-minded subscribers?

If you only use a handful of sites, you can also solve this problem by building yourself a site that handles specific types of queries.

I'm doing something like this, by building a site to search lectures (https://www.findlectures.com). The "fallback" for me is to just use youtube, etc instead.

Rather than trying to index everything on Reddit or Youtube, if you just index "good" parts it's a lot easier, since there is a lot of low quality material either way. I think you're more limited by bandwidth, for what you can get into your own index.

A search index is basically a mapping of hashed search tokens -> urls, so it can be pretty efficient to store locally (e.g. for a video search engine, you just need unique words in the transcript/title, not the entire video)

All I want to know is there an easy way to search results say 1 year old? In Google this is the qdr search parameter I'm the url... And the Google API doesn't support it anymore so far as I can tell.

Oh joy, an unofficial clone of the project supports upto Year range filter for search engines has merged a commit that adds support for it as of 3 days ago.

I find it so odd something so critical for software development can be so overlooked in such a tool.

Out of curiosity, what do you use it for? I can't remember ever needing that feature.

To look for recent answers to programming tasks that are not too out of date due to API versioning.

Looks like this scrapes results from Google directly [0]. Doesn't Google detect and IP block Searx instances? I'm fairly sure it's against their ToS.

[0] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/blob/master/searx/engines/...

One really useful feature would be the ability to submit all the links you visit to this directly via a browser extension and be able to search those links. That would be very useful. Plus a bookmarking feature. BTW does it support Altavista, WebCrawler, HotBot, or Lycos :)

I was hoping for AskJeeves and Teoma integration.

     BTW does it support Altavista, WebCrawler, HotBot, or Lycos

I haven't heard of most of those, but AltaVista was acquired by Yahoo! and integrated into their platform in 2003. The brand has been all but defunct for over a decade now...

That's the joke. Those were meta search engines back in the day.

My favorite was Metasearch or Metacrawler or something like that. It would show you what other users were searching for in real time.

That was Metaspy, part of Metacrawler.

Source: I wrote Metaspy. That was almost 20 years ago!

w00t! big fan of metacrawler back in the day.

>haven't heard of most of those

I feel like I'm 120 years old in Internet years. I mean, I remember when there was no Internet :/

So, does anybody remember Seeks? https://beniz.github.io/seeks/

Man this makes me think of back in the day using metasearch engines back when Yahoo and Ask were the only ones in town. It appears that Dogpile is still available.

This seem pretty cool! Are there browser plug-ins available?

I currently use DuckDuckGo. I'd switch to this if they implement the bang syntax, which I use constantly.

You can use bangs: https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/user/search_syntax.html. Instead of redirecting you, it changes the engines that are used for the search, so you still get anonymity. Also, you can use smart bookmarks[1][2] to get essentially the same functionality as bangs, but done directly by your web browser when you type keywords in the address bar, which skips a unneeded request to the search engine.

[1]: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Bookmarks

Could this commoditize search?

And if so, why should Google play along, and allow their search API to be used like this?

Just wondering.

If you're running one of these you're probably using ad block so google already doesn't care about you. What google does care about is agregate searches made. With this in hand you can easily find some interesting data that could be used to identify information that would be valuable.

There's always a way to make money and google has enough currently that it can explore all of these venues

Google search has been in use by startpage [1], the search engine that claims not to track users, for quite sometime. I use it the most, followed by using DuckDuckGo.

[1]: https://www.startpage.com

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