this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2022
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[–] kixik@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Question, what's the main difference between searx and searxng? I've used them indistinctly, and the 1st result when searching for the difference on searx.be (a searxng instance) is a searxng github issue with the question:

https://github.com/searxng/searxng/issues/46

Is there another one? Also the list of searx instances includes both, searx and searxng instances:

https://searx.space

How to know what meta search is each instance, without actually accessing each one (that if the instance tells you, like searx.be indicates it's searxng)?

Also, it seems, searx has less features, but that's on purpose, tying to prevent information gathering from the instances, whether by their owners or administrators. I like that. That makes me think I should really consider using searx only as much as possible, :)

searx.info used to be my preferred instance when alive, now searx.be is, :) But as searx.be is a searxng instance I might swtich to a searx one by default. I use Librewolf, and I'm wondering if there's a way to alternate/bounce between just a specific sub set of instances (the ones which countries of origin suggests more respect for privacy for example, the ones more up to date, and the ones with better security, the searx ones excluding searxng, for example).

I stopped using DDG years back, when reading it wasn't building their own indexes, and it was just another metasearch engine, just like searx itself, but worse, because it's not decentralized, it's for profit, and its head quarters are based on a non privacy respecting oriented country govt. You can read a dated post here in Lemmy:

https://lemmy.ml/post/43595/comment/22034

Unfortunately, it seems the original URL was "deleted", however here it is the URL:

https://torrentfreak.com/popular-pirate-sites-disappear-from-duckduckgos-top-search-results-201112

[–] hanabatake@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I think the github link sums up the differences between searx and his fork.

Version names of searx are of the form "1.0.0", whereas version names of searXNG are of the form "2022.03.07" (second column on https://searx.space).

[–] kixik@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

Great !!! That tells I should pay more attention, hahaha. Thanks a lot !

[–] rauba_code@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Interesting. DDG has been my primary preference since I boycott Google (search, Gmail, Play & Play Services) in 2020. I know SearX, I use it sometimes for research, but I want to get sure how metasearch works. I struggle to find information whether it 'crawls' and caches all the information from search engines, such as Google, Bing, DDG, Qwant, etc., on its server, or does it just pass your search query to these search engines and sums it up, like StartPage. But if DDG is just another nonfree metasearch, as you say, then it does not matter.