Privacy

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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.

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Which search engine should I use? (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

99 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have used SearXNG for a while, but I switched to LibreX after the search engine started glitching. Recently, though, LibreX has stopped returning any results. I am currently on Mojeek, but the results aren't that great.

I have also tried Qwant, but I wasn't too keen on it. Startpage will be impractical, as I use a VPN and this engine often blocks me because of it. I don't want to use Brave Search for a number of reasons. MetaGer has too many important features behind its paywall. I'm not sure about DuckDuckGo, but I could use it if there was no other option.

Any suggestions, or am I being too picky?

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

What issues did you have with SearXNG?

You could try to self host it, or even just run it on your local machine.

Shameless plug on how to set it up locally, and how to set up custom filters (to block junk websites and redirect reddit to the old interface).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It stopped returning results. I tried other instances: same problems. However, I think the issue may have been fixed.

I am currently on an iPhone, and I'm not really in a position to self-host (although I did try to set up a FreedomBox the other day).

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah fair enough.

I started by having it on my laptop, and used it only there. Liked it so much that I'm renting a VPS around $5 a month to have it on all my devices.

But to be fair, I'm also hosting other things on that VPS (SearXNG is very light), so it's multi-purpose.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Who do you like for VPS hosting?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I recommend Oracle Cloud Always Free - 4 Arm cores, 24GB RAM, 200GB storage. I've used it before they sanctioned Russia and it worked fine (but if hardware fails your data will stay but you will be at the bottom of the queue for replacement)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Went with linode since it was reasonably priced and popular. But might move if something better comes along.

I have all the server setup done with ansible, so it's super easy to reproduce everything in a new machine.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Hetzner.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I used it for a while but could not find good results for any kind of advanced query. Qwant in comparison is slightly better but still worse than duckduckgo unfortunately. For really niche stuff I still need to revert to Google..

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

You can get both qwant, duckduckgo, and Google with SearXNG, unless the instance you used had a config to not have them as an option...

That's why I just prefer to use my own.