Be Your Own Privacy-Respecting Google, Bing & Brave (%e3%83%9e%e3%83%aa%e3%82%a6%e3%82%b9.com)
from mesamunefire@piefed.social to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 03 Dec 00:01
https://piefed.social/c/selfhosted/p/1531882/be-your-own-privacy-respecting-google-bing-brave

… by running your own instance of the free and open-source federated metasearch engine SearXNG on OpenBSD!

#selfhosted

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thejml@sh.itjust.works on 03 Dec 00:56 next collapse

I run it in a container on Kubernetes. Definitely recommend.

jol@discuss.tchncs.de on 03 Dec 03:28 next collapse

I still don’t understand how Searx is able to operate for free. Don’t the API calls cost money?

irmadlad@lemmy.world on 03 Dec 03:48 next collapse

From what I’ve read, I believe it’s a combination of donations. sponsors, volunteer hosting from like minded organizations.

Neptr@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 03 Dec 07:57 collapse

If I had to guess, they probably don’t use the APIs, inside using scrapping of some sort.

sunstoned@lemmus.org on 03 Dec 15:03 collapse

My understanding is it scrapes what it can’t meaningfully get out of an API. Public instances run into rate limiting, but private instances don’t really have that problem.

ArchEngel@lemmy.ca on 03 Dec 04:29 next collapse

Thanks for posting, both a great reminder to try setting this up on my unraid, and also to add the RSS feed of that site to Feeder.

pipes@sh.itjust.works on 03 Dec 09:17 collapse

I just added it too, I had read a few articles of them already

yodeljunkmanenvy@piefed.social on 03 Dec 05:10 next collapse

There is also a list of publicly operated SearXNG instances at https://searx.space/. We host the one at https://search.freestater.org/, and there are plenty of other good ones.
<img alt="bVuZT3n0X1rOSXk.jpg" src="https://media.piefed.social/posts/bV/uZ/bVuZT3n0X1rOSXk.jpg">

Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 03 Dec 12:46 next collapse

Who says they are securely operated and don’t store any data??

jackr@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 03 Dec 14:25 next collapse

who says that about any search engine? can you trust them? searXNG is usually run by random people who are less likely to use your data than a larger search company

Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 03 Dec 19:38 collapse

At least with Google it wont be an individual that can open my data (most likely).
Probably only the AI or whatever can actually read any of it directly.

quick_snail@feddit.nl on 03 Dec 17:00 next collapse

If you’re using a shared IP, it doesn’t matter.

You are using a VPN or Tor, right?!?

yodeljunkmanenvy@piefed.social on 06 Dec 23:38 collapse

The devs at SearXNG have a bot that regularly scans the public instances for changes to the source code and delists them as a public instance if it’s altered.

If you go to https://searx.space, they show the results of the scans for each instance.

The software is free and open source. You are encouraged to inspect the code yourself to make sure no data is collected!

Here is the source code: 

https://github.com/searxng/searxng

Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 07 Dec 09:33 collapse

Thank you very much for proving what’s correct :)

[deleted] on 06 Dec 23:37 collapse

.

grue@lemmy.world on 03 Dec 06:52 next collapse

Is metasearch really the best we can do? What about YaCy, or something else more like that?

MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz on 03 Dec 07:50 next collapse

It’s not federated tho?

What do they mean when they call it that?

ap1werks@sh.itjust.works on 03 Dec 08:01 next collapse

look at that domain name! respect

Cyberflunk@lemmy.world on 03 Dec 14:36 next collapse

If you’re interested in this, the term you’re looking for is punycode

quick_snail@feddit.nl on 03 Dec 16:59 collapse

Usually its a sign of a scam. Looks like a ransomware c2 domain

Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 03 Dec 12:45 next collapse

Brave is a search engine?
That’s news to me.

Cyberflunk@lemmy.world on 03 Dec 14:34 next collapse

it’s no kagi, but its ok

elcroqueta@lemmy.cafe on 03 Dec 19:38 collapse

Brave have they’re own search engine

N0x0n@lemmy.ml on 03 Dec 13:07 next collapse

I used to self-host searxng for a while, but somehow the search results were always off and mixed with to much non-relevant results :/.

It’s not about searxng itself… Rather how the most relevant info gets drown into AI slope and non-sense bullshit. The best blogposts/info are transmitted from people to people…

I’m kinda sad to admit that stupid AI “solved” this issue and had better results :/

A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world on 03 Dec 14:44 next collapse

I used to self-host searxng for a while, but somehow the search results were always off and mixed with to much non-relevant results :/.

I mean, getting non-relevant results happens with every search engine anymore.

The days of your search results being relevant, and what you want on the first page, are long dead thanks to SEO and other factors.

N0x0n@lemmy.ml on 03 Dec 15:38 collapse

Yeah you’re right ! However, ages ago, I still remember how you could go to page 20+ and still find some really interesting things !

Here, past page 2 it’s just some random shit…

A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world on 03 Dec 17:28 collapse

Most of its just AI generated websites. Search for any topic and you’re likely to get 50 AI generated website that give a similar bulletpoint presentation of what search item X is according to the AI that generated the site.

N0x0n@lemmy.ml on 04 Dec 10:36 collapse

50 AI generated website that give a similar bulletpoint presentation of what search item X is according to the AI that generated the site.

Yeah that’s what I meant by “random” shit ! 😁

sunstoned@lemmus.org on 03 Dec 15:09 next collapse

You can self host that too ;)

OpenWebUI + Ollama + SearxNG. OpenWebUI can do llm web search using the engine of your choice (even self hosted SearxNG!). From there it’s easy to set the default prompt to always give you the top (10, 20, whatever) raw results so you’re not confined to ai results. It’s not quite duck.ai slick but I think I can get there with some more tinkering.

N0x0n@lemmy.ml on 03 Dec 15:43 next collapse

Ohoho? That’s interesting. I don’t have the horse power to selfhost an AI, but that’s good to know !

Thanks for the pointer !!!

dubyakay@lemmy.ca on 03 Dec 16:08 collapse

Is there a guide on how to do this on Linux + 16GB Radeon?

sunstoned@lemmus.org on 03 Dec 17:05 collapse

I mean, I could write one! I kind of just pieced it together from guides on the three individuals

Edit: back of the napkin guide below is basically in the OpenWebUI docs already! I use NixOS (btw) but docker/podman should work well.

OpenWebUI + Ollama setup – tl;dr docker run -d -p 3000:8080 --add-host=host.docker.internal:host-gateway -v open-webui:/app/backend/data --name open-webui --restart always ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:main

OpenWebUI SearXNG guide – a little more involved, but not difficult.

Fleppensteijn@feddit.nl on 04 Dec 10:13 collapse

I don’t know any other search that lets you block urls from results. Blocking stuff like social media and Amazon cleans up the results very well.

biotin7@sopuli.xyz on 03 Dec 17:34 next collapse

Or how about YaCy. It’s self-hostable & you can have your own web index and start your own web-crawler.

It’s peer-to-peer too

mesamunefire@piefed.social on 03 Dec 17:35 next collapse

I personally love yacy.

motruck@lemmy.zip on 04 Dec 19:38 next collapse

This is exactly what I came here to find. Thank you for posting it. If I can be so bold selfhosters should really be leaning this way searxng is great but it still uses big tech.

The other thing we need is a way to identify good crawling agents or *smol agents over corporate bots that just steal content.

If selfhosters can unite and build a good index perhaps searching can go back to the way it was vs a vector to sell you more and collect your data.

biotin7@sopuli.xyz on 05 Dec 06:22 collapse

You know what else I like ? Fossil

It’s a FOSS alternative to Git itself, their official site itself is a self-hosted instance of Fossil.

044en17rl@lemmy.world on 07 Dec 23:34 collapse

How good are the results compared to Google/Duckduckgo?

biotin7@sopuli.xyz on 09 Dec 09:28 collapse

You make your own index with this one

carrylex@lemmy.world on 03 Dec 17:35 next collapse

For anyone wondering xn–gckvb8fzb.com is マリウス.com

Also: Maybe they should get a “normal” domain when you post english articles…

mesamunefire@piefed.social on 03 Dec 17:38 collapse

Does the url not resolve on certain browsers or something? I usually just copy/paste or use a firefox plugin to generate posts for lemmy/piefed/fediverse.

carrylex@lemmy.world on 03 Dec 21:13 collapse

It resolves well but punnycode is disabled in some browsers or security enhanced profiles, so that you can easier detect punnycode domains that try to fake other domains.

mesamunefire@piefed.social on 03 Dec 21:15 collapse

Im not familiar with punnycode. Interesting.

sludgewife@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 04 Dec 00:18 collapse

it’s punycode

pineapple@lemmy.ml on 03 Dec 23:59 next collapse

The search engines that searxng interact with still track you. For this reason I will always use a public instance to mix up the tracking with everyone else using it.

TractorDuffy@lemmy.world on 04 Dec 02:39 collapse

Explain?

pineapple@lemmy.ml on 04 Dec 07:46 collapse

Using a public instance is more private than using a private selfhosted instance.

TractorDuffy@lemmy.world on 05 Dec 04:20 collapse

…a public Lemmy instance? How is that related to the the search engine?

044en17rl@lemmy.world on 07 Dec 23:33 next collapse

a public SearXNG instance

pineapple@lemmy.ml on 09 Dec 07:46 collapse

044en17rl is right I meant a public seaxng instance.

ripcord@lemmy.world on 04 Dec 00:35 collapse

BSD FTW