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?
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.
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 have deployed it using docker. But I am still having trouble setting it up with cloudflare and my domain.
Pretty easy to maintain, ive switched over to using my instance as a default search provider and works great.
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.
I keep breaking mine but I dig it overall
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.
I just have it running in a docker container…
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.
I have it setup on each of my laptops, so I have it available at all time with no need to expose it on my home setup.
Automatically start the container on my laptop, and add it to my browser’s search engines as default. Pretty simple.
