Hacker News Reader

Comment by spinax | Hacker News Reader

Ctrl+F shows nobody has mentioned searx yet, so let me - you can have your cake and eat it, too. searx uses modest resources (2G disk/2G RAM, cloud server friendly) and gives you all the results from all the search engines without being tracked in your end-user browser.

Here are some existing public instances to get started (visit Preferences! You can choose your own search engines!) and there are many, many more not listed on this page out there:

https://searx.space/

Give searx a try - what I like most is that it sees the same top result from 2 sources (say, Google and DDG) and places them as a single entry as first, but then offers a link that neither one of those had (say, Mojeek) as the second result. It actually helps you find more content by spreading out your searches to many engines at the same time and giving the best results grouped.

View on HN

I have a whoogle and a searx instance running based on the official docker images. With my subjective tests Searx seems to be slower and buggy though. I am curious to know how can I optimize the speed as much as much possible.

Whoogle is a Google anonymizer and stripper-of-chaff, searx is a content aggregator on top of that same concept. While similar in the first context, searx provides a secondary layer of interacting with many search engines for well rounded content. Nothing wrong with whoogle, just not an exact 1-to-1 comparison. (cannot speak to your issues with speed and bugs, I suggest opening an issue on their Github and explaining your problems or a dedicated user forum maybe reddit?)

Thanks a lot for this. Will definitely give this a go as I'm using Google for my programming related searches and DDG for normal searches. Will see if this satisfies my needs or not.

I run my own searx instance and it's amazing. One issue I am facing is with images not loading in the Images section sometimes, but other than it's perfect and I recommend it.

Just to share for readers, what are your personal RAM/CPU/disk usage measurements? The instance I use is shared with a small group so my numbers above may be skewed.

FYI:

https://searx.me/ appears to be the link to the project and information on how to host your own setup.

This is a great tool, thanks for telling us about it (actually I discovered that I've bookmarked the searx page before and forgot about it:))

If the only person using the searx instance is you/me (aka self hosted) then now we are getting tracked by every search engine

Wow. This seems very cool. I wonder if there's a possiblity to add Stackoverflow as a search engine directly to searx.

Update: stackoverflow found under It settings

I guess this is possible only because Google allows/tolerates it? What would happen if a significant amount of people start using it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com