SearXNG

Originally published on 2022-07-10.

Drew’s Private Search Engine

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Now hosted locally as a service. I have created an instance of SearXNG that is up and running, fully self hosted on my server.

What is SearXNG?

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SearXNG is a metasearch engine, aggregating the results of other search engines while not storing information about its users. Basically, it is a private search engine that anyone can use that I am now hosting on my personal server. There are no adds, every search you make is not being compiled to create a digital voodoo doll of you so that companies can target advertisements at you more efficiently, it can be customized to your liking, and leverages the results of more than seventy search engines at once. SearXNG is a fork from the well-known searx metasearch engine. It provides basic privacy by mixing your queries with searches on other platforms without storing search data.

SearXNG can be added to your browser’s search bar; moreover, it can be set as the default search engine. I have already set it as the default on my devices and I encourage you to do the same. This was the solution I was looking for a few months back when I wrote my article about DuckDuckGo censoring “Disinformation”, you can read that post here. At the end I recommended using an instance of SearX but I was never satisfied because I was still using someone else’s search engine. I wanted my own. Anyways, I have been using my instance of SearXNG as my primary search engine for a couple days now and I cannot express how satisfying it is to no longer rely on proprietary search engines where you know every search you make is being logged and used against you. If you are interested in creating your own private search engine then I have included the resources I used below. If you would rather use one of the other many publicly available instances of SearXNG then I have included a link for that below as well.

Resources

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For further information on how I setup SearXNG consult the following resources:

• SearXNG docs
• List of publicly available SearXNG instances: searx.space
• Landchad.net’s guide: landchad.net/searxng/
• YouTube installation guide by NetworkChuck: ditch Google!! (build your own PRIVATE search engine)