I tried using SearXNG for a few weeks but I kept needing to chance instances. I'm using DuckDuckGo for now.
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
114 points (96.0% liked)
Privacy
32159 readers
427 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
You can self host for a better experience
I'm using https://metager.de/ it's German and sometimes the results lean towards that but in 99% of cases it doesn't matter.
There's an English version out there, but some essential features are paid, such as enabling moderate safesearch or adding Mojeek as an engine.
I'm using Startpage, and I also have a self-hosted Adguard DNS on my network so that helps a bit too.
I'd say give SearXNG another try. Whats the issue exactly?
I used SearXNG for over a month but found myself routinely returning to Google for either tech problem searches or because it was returning irrelevant results for homonyms.
I would love to return to it. Do you have any tips for better search results?
- Depending on your language, use language codes like
:enor:de. Very important if your native language isn't English. - You can choose the search engine using DDG shebangs like
!g(or redirect yourself to Google using!!g - If SearxNG using Google gives you much worse results, it just means Google has that much info about you. Nonetheless, that's not my experience
You can choose which search engines you actually want to use. SearXNG is a meta search engine, which means it just queries other search engines for their results. Lots of it's results are some random wikis which most of the time do not help.
I use MetaGer as my daily driver and you.com for deeper niche searches
As main search, among others, I use Andisearch, it's an AI search assistant, with own lenguage model and one of the most private search engine. own reader mode for websites in the search results, so you don't need to visit it, you also can watch YouTube and others sandboxed right in the search results, anonymous use, no ads, no tracking, no logs.
Easy add it to your search engine list in your browser
https://andisearch.com/?query=%s
tbh im not sure but if you want google results with safesearch try resulti