Today I decided to install SearxNG, just to for $h1ts and giggles, and to avoid a little bit of tracking by those creeps at Google and Bing.
I started wit a clean Debian 12 LXC container on my Proxmox server and used the installation script route. I just needed to:
- Create a non-root user . DO NOT call this user searxng, this is the user the install script creates for you, if it already exists, the script will fail
- Add this user to the the sudo group
- Install sudo, git and curl
- Clone the install repo
- Run the install script
- Run the nginx setup script
That’s it. The search page will be available in http://<ip-address>/searxng
So how are the results from searches?
They are pretty good, you get a mix of bing, duck, and google results that are ranked. You can check out a public instance at https://SearX.space
Searxng is great ! I totally ditched and blocked all google’s DNS/api requests and while the search results are okayish, It isn’t as good as google search engine.
Sometimes I get the exact same link from the previous page, sometimes twice and the results aren’t as precise as google’s engine. But that’s a trade I’m willing to take when degoogling !
Also, the docker-container/compose version needs sometimes some inter-docker intervention. If you’re not tech-savy and have no idea of python scripts and how to exec into containers, this can sometimes create some frustration, when all engines are raising errors !
Thankfully, if you’re not a selfhoster enthusiast, there are plenty of public instances !
It’s probably the most important selfhosted service in my stack :) !
Also, the docker-container/compose version needs sometimes some inter-docker intervention. If you’re not tech-savy and have no idea of python scripts and how to exec into containers, this can sometimes create some frustration, when all engines are raising errors !
I 100% agree that SearxNG is amazing. It’s the only engine I use now. I’m not sure I understand how you needed the knowledge of Python though. I’ve been running SearxNG for quite a while and have never had to touch a single line of Python.
Yeah It’s probably just me and my learning process ! There was a case, where duckduckgo didn’t worked anymore, opened a github issue and followed some steps to change some specfic strings in a python script inside the container (nothing fancy actually).
After the testing process they update the searxng docker image. You probably didn’t nocticed it if you regularly pull the new image.
Except for that specific case, it runs smooth as butter :))
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