How many of you have tried using SearXNG? It's a meta search engine that pull data from a number of sources before ranking and displaying them. I really like the cached feature that tries to load the internet archive copy of the page.
Spun up the container about a week ago. Made it my default search in Firefox. So far I’ve been happy with the quality of the results although I will admit there is a perceptible lag when submitting searches, compared to google/bing/etc… I imagine that’s mostly to do with the fact that it’s waiting on multiple search engines to fill my request.
I do like it so far. I figure with some tuning I could get the response time down.
I use SearXNG since half a year or so I think. It can be a little bit slow at times and some source engines will be deactivated temporarily. But overall its good enough for my daily use. I don't search the web too often anyway and often use the search on the services webpage directly (Steam, Wikipedia or other stuff in example). One can default to SearXNG and in some cases use DuckDuckGo or Startpage (instead Google) for alternative results.
However sometimes an instance is offline temporarily or forever (but never tested after forever, so not sure about that). In those cases I have to switch to a different instance in Firefox default search engine, which I have bookmarked a few to choose from. So be prepared.
I really tried to love it. I tweaked a lot of settings but i never quite got the results i wanted. I still have a selfhosted instance running for occasional use. But i mainly use DuckDuckGo now.
I used it for like 2 years, even hosted an instance myself just for myself. But I moved away from it recently because some problems were never fixed: Searches often return 0 results because of timeouts of the selected search engines and (often, not always) a bad order of the search results.
It's good and I use it but at the same time I have also noticed that specially Google results are sometimes absolutely bad compared to directly searching on Google, and I am talking so bad that it probably is on purpose.
But it's fine because bangs will give you all the power
In my experience SearX is the search engine that gives the best result for me once configurated to my liking, even beating google ( by getting some of google's results ). The only downside is that sometimes the instances I use are down and I have to use another.
I got a private instance going a few months ago and I really like it. It's just a little slow cause it runs on a Pi (my only 24/7 device at the moment). The hostname rewrite feature is cool and I'll have to check out the archive cache feature.
I also use a public instance at work and it's way more effective than the bloated corporate search engines. Super handy for engine or language specific searches too.
Just a few days ago I had commented elsewhere that, disappointed with recent Brave Search results, I should have used a meta search engine instead. Thanks to your post I stopped procrastinating and started trying a SearXNG instance as default search engine (just tweaking engine settings a bit), so far everything seems good, results are on point and in multiple languages (last time I had tried a meta search engine a few years ago I had to change manually the language for each search, and it was annoying given that I often search the web in at least three languages, sometimes four) and the uncluttered UI is very nice. I'll test it out for a few days I guess, but the first impression is good.
I've been running a private instance for about a year as my main search engine and for a few friends. Really great results with the aggregation, simple to maintain, and have only had a couple issues where my IP got rate limited by one engine for a day or so.
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