The instances that give the best results seem to also get throttled pretty often on the source search engines, to the point of near uselessness.
Thinking of hosting my own, but the maintenance seems pretty involved according to the docs.
What’s your experience been like?
The only annoyance I’ve had with it is searches will sometimes default to another language, even though I set the language to only return English results.
Also, I’ve found that the image/map search capabilities are less performant than googles.
But I still use it because the search results are so clean and no-frills.
i been hosting my instance for a while its not on the main list but its still publicly accesible never had a issue with it
@BonkTheAnnoyed SearXNG has been my main search engine for about three years now, running on a local Yunohost.
Almost no maintenance.
Its not that difficult, i have mine set up with gluetun and I’ve been using for more than 1 year now, sometimes i have some problem with the search terms and every engine gets broken but i just need to search with another name
Usually if this happens for me it’s an issue with the gluetun end, since all the big names love to throttle known VPNs. Fixes itself after a few minutes, but if I’m not feeling lazy a quick stack restart tends to fix it too.
Yes. I selfhost it. It’s pretty easy. All you need to know is that you occasionally need to merge your config with the original that is getting updated.
If you know how to use nvim diff mode, it’s trivial.
I wish we have a free to use, open source, and privacy respecting search engine that do the crawling and indexing and don’t rely on other search engines.
Maybe we can utilize all selfhosted instances to do the crawling and consolidate it.
Not saying it’s perfect but doesn’t Yacy do this?
How did I not know about it sooner.
Thank you!!
Can’t wait to use it. Id support them as much as I can.
I have deployed it using docker. But I am still having trouble setting it up with cloudflare and my domain.
I host it as a docker container and the maintenance has been painless
+1 to that. I started hosting it recently and haven’t even had to do anything about maintenance
Same here. Once in a while I update the config with all the changed engines. But that’s about it.
Pretty easy to maintain, ive switched over to using my instance as a default search provider and works great.
Self hosting and the maintenance is painless, but the results have been pretty terrible lately
Is it still worth it though? Nice username btw lel
Lol, thanks. I think it’s still worth it if you want more ownership over your searches, but just expect some rough edges
Why terrible?
Recently I’ll often get results that aren’t at all related to what I searched for. I also get a lot of timeouts from the upstream search engines, and sometimes I get results that are in Chinese for some reason
IIRC these are related to Bing misbehaving. There should be an ooen issue about that. Try deactivating it in preferences flash a workaround.
There’s an open issue about this on github. It’s the remote API is only recognising the first word of your query.
This has been bugging me too.
The timeouts are because the engines are presenting captchas. There’s a work around whereby you use your instance as a proxy, navigate to that remote engine, and do the captcha.
These two issues are a real pain in the ass so while I do presently have a searxng instance I’ve been using qwant the last few weeks because I’m just over it.
Interesting.
I deployed it in a Docker container. It is my default search engine. I use it constantly. Besides Calibre & Navidrome, it’s one of my most heavily used, selfhosted apps.
Navidrome❤️
It is so undervalued for how amazing streaming your own music collection is.
It is so undervalued for how amazing streaming your own music collection is.
It is indeed. Even yesterday, I was in the kitchen making my ‘world famous’ Italian Seasoning bread with 7 natural herbs and spices. I have an old phone I use just for the WiFi, pulled up my Navidrome instance, set the phone up in the window sill, put my headphones on, and had a good time. I was even inspired to make some fudge.
spoiler
I just have it running in a docker container…
I keep breaking mine but I dig it overall
I have it installed as a docker container on a server on my home network, and use it as my default search on my home machines, and access it on mobile through wireguard.
I host and use it as my default search on all devices. Bare metal deployment. The maintenance is pretty low, I just run the instance update script from to time.
Results have been worse lately, I think it needs some tuning in regards to weights and what engines are in use.
