Searx is dead. You’ll want to use SearxNG instead.

I recently learned about it, but haven’t used it. From what I understand, it’s similar to how the fediverse works; individual instances are run by whoever wants to run them. If you run your own instance, you have complete trust in it, but you effectively aren’t anonymous (unless you support a whole bunch of users to pool together. If you join someone else’s instance, you have to trust them. There’s public and private instances.

The other downside is that, like many other small players, they are a metasearch engine, so they rely on the big players like Google and Bing who actually crawl the web for information to index. If Google or Bing want to hide information, that trickles down into metasearch engines, too. It’s somewhat buffered by thr fact that your metasearch can look through a whole bunch of different indexes, so you aren’t held to one countries censorship, but it probably still has an effect.

I’m running a search instance on a VPS so my home IP isn’t linked to my searches. The main disadvantage is that my VPS is in Toronto and I live 2hrs away so geo searches don’t work very well. For instance, if I Google “restaurants” I get results for local restaurants whereas if I Gregle (I named my search engine Gregle) I get results for results near my VPS.

DM me if you want a link to my instance to check it out. It’s open but I don’t publicize it because bad actors could ruin my IP addresses reputation with spam queries via the API.

I’m holding a cell phone in my hand, hence any concern about privacy-friendly is moot!

The trend this minute appears to be searx, but if you’re truly concerned, you’ll have to trash and burn all your devices, bank cards, alarms, cctvs, doorcams, etc, and start over from scratch.

It depends on what you’re trying to be private from. Kagi has been good to me so far, my goal is mainly to escape from corporate/ad profile tracking.

Webrings ftw

I knew my bookmarks would save me

Where do you find them?

I never left.

• Swiss Cows
• Mojeek
• StartPage

I’ve collected these 3 so far, but Swiss Cows if you go deep enough uses Bing. I’m not sure about Mojeek or Start Page.

I use kagi, it’s very good.

Mojeek isn’t perfect, but it’s truly independent search engine.

I’m currently using searx.be with good results

If you have spare hardware lying around and a public IP (or a server anyway), you can selfhost SearXNG.
If you’re fine with paying 12$/month (with tax) for a customizable search engine, very accurate and transparently sourced/quoted LLM, and just a better index than any other search engine I know, use Kagi. I heard some rumors and bad things, but nothing to do with privacy, only the aforementioned tax.
And for a free search engine which claims privacy and is an alternative to DDG, with its own index afaik, Brave.

Honestly thats like the most annoying thing about lemmy. Or maybe its just sync. But still damn annoying.

Okay but do you also do that for StackOverflow? And if so, then also for IMDB, and everything else? Google invested heavy effort to get people to not even remember or bookmark URLs - simply type “Wikipedia” into the bar and it would do a quick search to translate that into something, perhaps https://www.wikipedia.org/ or even https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. Later, browsers started allowing other ways like searching through your locally stored bookmarks, but that doesn’t change how Google pushed heavily and first towards being your one-stop place to find what you want just by thinking about it and typing a word or two. Their summaries of movies I find far superior to IMDB, and even to Wikipedia, if all I want is like the most famous movie or two from a particular actor/actress to think - “oh, that’s where I know them from!”

You resisted that trend, which was inefficient, and introduced another dependency of Google to something that did not need it in the chain of finding results that you expected to be found on Wikipedia, so good on you. But not everyone did that.

Likewise, adding “Reddit” to a query added another purpose: if you knew you wanted a search result from Reddit specifically, then finding it via Google was far easier than trying to use Reddit’s internal search, which remains extremely poorly implemented. A lot of places use Google searches internally, and if not then they rely on Google externally, to help find content in them. And why not, bc Google “wasn’t evil”, unlike e.g. Microsoft or questionably (at the time) Apple? So bc everything tied back to Google regardless, why not get the full Google experience? Or so I imagine the thinking went.

But no, I don’t think “people” meaning “everyone” already went straight to where they wanted to search, and even those of us who did (I also most often went straight to Wikipedia, depending on what I was searching for, bc it has fairly good internal search capabilities) did not do it for everything or even perhaps for most things - the latter measured as width of categorizations as in breadth of variety of info - even if not numerically as in “most searches performed”. Google was extremely prominent and central for most people, especially those who did not think about how prominent and central it had become.

That’s my experience as well. Now I use a SearXNG instance with Google as the only source and it works well I’d say roughly 97% of the time.

I’m pretty sure it’s just trendy to call Google search shit, and to criticise the top product. I’m also pretty sure DDG is just uses Bing search under the hood (plus it’s privacy features), so I always thought these complaints were quite funny. The ads on Google are probably the most aggressive though, which IMO is the worst part.

It may be the instance you used or something else I’m not aware of, but I always get great results.

The only thing is sometimes an instance dies and I need to find and start using another one, but it’s not a big deal. You can find instances here.