actually awesome and fast search engine (depending on which instance you use) with no trashy AI and ADs results also great for privacy, if you don’t know which instance to use go to https://searx.space/ and choose an instance closest to you

  • Kaiyo@lemmy.world
    454·
    6 days ago

    I mean it’s often better than nothing, but it is a meta search that still often uses Google or Bing to gather results. IMHO, cut off the need for that data on the whole and use an option like Mojeek

    • Steve@communick.newsEnglish
      58·
      6 days ago

      For all their talk of doing things different with their own index and rankings. Mojeek is following exactly what Google did. It’s still an ad based business model that makes users into products to be sold to advertisers. They’re good now, while still trying to build market share. But once their investors get hungry, the enshitification will commence.

      • Mojeek Search Engine@lemmy.ml
        17·
        5 days ago

        we make money mainly from our api, our investors are patient private capital and we don’t take vc, appreciate your point but these are fundamentally different situations, our ads (when they run) will also be contextual so more of a ddg situation than a “makes users into products to be sold to advertisers”

        fair enough if it’s not for you though

        • pinkystew@reddthat.comEnglish
          51·
          5 days ago

          I don’t know if the comparison is inaccurate.

          You make money from advertising to your users (“ddg situation” notwithstanding), are beholden to your investors (private status notwithstanding) and need to see more users to increase revenue. The person above you is saying that this model is what will drive you to eventually be as bad as Google. Do you understand?

        • Steve@communick.newsEnglish
          2·
          5 days ago

          API index access is an important difference.
          If it was only that, without public facing ad driven search, I’d be more impressed.

          Maybe if you removed the adds, and severely rate limited your own public facing search, so it’s more of a demo than an actual service. This would force you to solely make money off the API access, without directly competing against those customers.

          That would be an honest buisness model. One that doesn’t turn users into eyeballs for advertising. Which seems to me, to be the most insidious problem of the modern internet.

        • Eugenia@lemmy.mlEnglish
          42·
          5 days ago

          Do you have topics that are censored? I searched for my reddit post “what I’ve learnt from the mantis aliens”, and it does not show up in your results. Neither at google’s. But it does on other search engines. The ufo/alien stuff are censored in most search engines, while there isn’t a reason to be. That is how I judge search engines. And Mojeek doesn’t give me the results I asked for.

    • JustMarkov@lemmy.mlEnglish
      15·
      6 days ago

      Mojeek is cool, but trying to search something in my first language results in 0 results find.

    • ColdWater@lemmy.caOP
      4·
      6 days ago

      You can use Mojeek with SearX Nvm with nothing enabled but Mojeek returned no results, I wonders why is that?

      • ColdWater@lemmy.caOP
        21·
        6 days ago

        I could be wrong but didn’t Mojeek also index results from Google and Bing? I’m wrong they index their own results, I mean Qwant is a search engine built in EU and they index their own results

  • Mandy@sh.itjust.works
    8·
    5 days ago

    Man, i wish i had the same experiencr

    The couple of times I tried it out, the search results where barely accurate

  • username@lemm.eeEspañol
    9·
    5 days ago

    I’d use it if its public instances didn’t get rate-limited so often

  • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    5 days ago

    Been rocking self-hosted Searxng for the last 3 weeks now as my default search engine; it’s as good or better than DDG and certainly better than Google. Results I need are usually within the first three items, no extraneous shit.

    I thought I’d just try it out, but it’s staying. The ability to tune the background engines is awesome. My search history is private (though I wasn’t that worried about DDG, there was no way in fuck I was using Kagi) since it’s running it’s searches via a VPN and returning me results locally.

    • x00z@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      Keep in mind that to protect your privacy you should also share your instance with others. All the searches are still linked to an IP which can be abused as well.

      • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        5 days ago

        Yes, that’s the purpose of the VPN. It’s out there mixed in with everyone else that’s using that exit node.

        Honestly, it’s not too much of a concern to me, I’m not doing anything illegal or naughty, it’s just making sure I’m not part of the dataset.

    • Corgana@startrek.website
      1·
      5 days ago

      How does it work self hosting? Is it querying other search engines or just maintaining a database on your server?

      • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        5 days ago

        Its all calls to other engines, that you can choose and tune. So its making those calls and filtering out shit like AI results, and then ranking it to return back to you. Seems to do a good job.

  • OfficerBribe@lemm.ee
    51·
    5 days ago

    Aren’t all search queries available to whoever hosts an instance? In my eyes this is much worse to privacy and a much bigger risk unless you really know who is behind your chosen instance. I would trust some a company a bit more with safeguarding this information so it does not leak to some random guy.

  • Shareni@programming.dev
    4·
    5 days ago

    It’s ok at best, when it works. When it runs out of API hits for the day at noon, you need to use something like https://searx.neocities.org/ and retype your search multiple times until you manage to hit an instance that can actually perform a search.

    Also, no suggestions.

        • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          5 days ago

          Not if it runs the queries it sends out via a VPN where it mingles with thousands of other requests. An API call doesn’t have the disadvantages of browser fingerprinting, cookies, etc that are used to build a background of a user browsing to your search engine and track their searches. Also, there is no feedback to the search engine about which result you choose to use. If you allow outside users, it would further muddy the waters.

          Ideally, you’d have it run random searches when not being used to further obfuscate the source.

  • sga@lemmy.world
    6·
    5 days ago

    If you are on a desktop, you can run it locally, you are much less likely to be rate limited, but this comes at cost of your ip being still visible to google or whatever search engine you choose to scrape from

    • ColdWater@lemmy.caOP
      12·
      6 days ago

      I never use DDG before, but I think it’s pretty similar since DDG and SearX index their results from Bing (SearX and also index from Google, qwant… if you enable them), but SearX is decentralized and open source but DDG at core is not, you also have to trust DDG with your info (who know? maybe they lie about their privacy policy but I hope not)

    • kekmacska@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      6 days ago

      a lot more search results, but they are ordered in a very weird way. it lists subdomains first, then the main domain

  • Anon518@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    51·
    5 days ago

    I checked it out, but most of the public instances I looked at use google + bing. I think I only came across one that used Mojeek, but they deranked it so google results were still at the top.

    Yeah you can customize them – if you never clear your cookies.

    Pretty much need to self-host it to customize it.

    • helpmyusernamewontfi@lemmy.today
      2·
      5 days ago

      if you never clear your cookies.

      They allow you to use a link instead for saving settings, which can also be used to set as your default search engine

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
    2·
    5 days ago

    Can someone explain the meaning of the name and the people having this project please?

    You’re trusting how information is filtered and funneled to you with a search tool, but a change to take lightly. Google sucks, but they have a lot to lose, a lot of eyes on them and I know generally their base motivations.

    • boonhet@lemm.ee
      3·
      5 days ago

      Fortunately, you can read through the source code of SearxNG and even modify it - provided that you also publish the modified version to your users if you host it publicly.

      You can run your own instance, public or private. Or you can use a public instance.

      Internally, it uses other search engines, rather than crawling the entire web and indexing everything.