this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2024
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You may self-host SearxNG (via Docker) and avoid direct interaction with search engines - be it google, bing, Brave or DDG.
SearxNG will act as a privacy front-end for you.
https://github.com/searxng/searxng
Have tried out SearxNG without self-hosting, via different instances, but had to abandon it as it is way, way beyond my mental capabilities to get it to work.
I doubt I could manage to self-host, having looked into Docker for some other matter.
Using Mojeek currently, which isn't great but not too terrible.
Though it is an off-topic but what exact issues you faced with SearxNG?
Well, it worked initially, then more often than not my searches produced no results or confusing error messages.
Experimented a lot with the SearxNG settings, and also with my browser and firewall settings in case there was some issue there, and eventually gave up.
I was unable to find information online about the issues I experienced, in part because I had no idea how to describe them in order to find help.
Think I tried it in three different browsers, over the course of a month or so, but primarily in Firefox.
To be honest, I never tried publicly available instances of any privacy front-ends (SearxNG, Nitter, Redlib etc.). I always self-host and route all such traffic via VPN.
My initial issue with SearxNG was with the default selection of search engines. Default inclusion of Qwant engine caused irrelevant and non-english results to return. Currently my selection is limited to Google, Bing and Brave as DDG takes around 2 sec to return result (based on the VPN server location I'm using).
If you still remember the error messages, I might help to help fix that.
You can send us in results via the submit feedback button or contact page when they're not-so good, if you'd like to help