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Comment by zeratax | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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)

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