I use Duckduckgo, but I realised these big(ish) search engines give me all the commercialised results. Duckduckgo has been going down the slope for years, but not at such a rate as Google or Bing has.
I want to have a search engine that gives me all the small blogs and personal sites.
Does something like this exist?
Can you expand on how running your own SearXNG helps others? Does it contribute to some shared index or something?
SearXNG is a meta search engine, which means it gets the search results from other search engines (Google, Bing, Qwant, etc.) and show them to you. It acts a proxy, thus hiding the users IP. This means Google can’t target ads based on your IP and also can’t make a profile about you.
What IP is Google getting if I self host the instance?
The instance’s IP
Right. So, my IP. Which is the same (IP-wise) as if I’d just searched Google directly, leaving aside the benefits of searching other engines simultaneously.
I’ve also seen people suggest we should open our self-hosted SearXNG instances to others and let random people submit searches to it thereby causing searches to appear to come from my home IP address. That strikes me as a terrible idea given what some people search on the web. I have also never run a TOR exit node.
I use Kagi myself and I was hooked after using their free trial so I’m comparing to that.
When I submit a search to Kagi, Google (and their other downstream search engines) gets the search from Kagi. Yes, that means I have to trust Kagi to some extent but as we can see, there are obvious problems with SearXNG whether using it myself or opening it to others.
The AI features are mentioned further up the thread as a negative but I disagree. I recently cancelled my subscription to ChatGPT ($20/mo) and upgraded my Kagi subscription ($25/mo) which gives me searching and access to all the most popular LLMs which I do use from time to time, mostly for code help. Personally, it’s a great value.
I didn’t even know about the AI features when I started paying for it. That “side” of Kagi is fully optional and very unobtrusive.
It is somewhat like a TOR exit node indeed. Though you can easily prove your innocence by saying that you did not make these searches but that you merely run a meta search engine that helps others protect their privacy. Even the TOR project has templates for exit nodes to submit them to the government or whoever is contacting them in those cases.
https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/tor-abuse-templates/
Yeah, I’m not out to complicate my life in that way.
Alright. You do you, pal.