I like the idea of SearXNG, but I don’t see why so many people like it for self hosting. You’re still querying search engines with your IP which in many self hosted cases is the same IP as the one you browse the internet with. I think SearXNG is really good if you setup a service on a server IP (like a VPS) and it gets used by multiple people, or if you tunnel it trough a VPN, but then again you could also just VPN your search engine searches.
So why do you like it? Is it for the aggregation of multiple engines? Or maybe the fact that it doesn’t link your specific browser to a search? I really wonder and am not hating.
IP in itself might not be as much of a problem, unless you have a static IP, which most consumers don’t. And even if you do, you are also hiding a lot of baggage relating to user agents or other fingerprintable settings. IP alone is rarely used as a sole point to link your traffic to other datapoints. On top of that, you can still just decide to exclude google, bing etc from your search results and rely more “open” ones like DDG or ecosia.
Another huge upside of searxng is the aggregation of results. The search results of google are all up to, well, google. Same with bing, which is controlled by microsoft. If these companies now decide to “surpress” certain information, people using only those engines directly would no longer see those news. However, if you get your results from multiple search engines, you are not - or lets say less - affected by that kind of nonsense.
As always with news and information, the truth usually lies somewhere in the middle. And that’s where searxng helps out tremendously.
I like the idea of SearXNG, but I don’t see why so many people like it for self hosting. You’re still querying search engines with your IP which in many self hosted cases is the same IP as the one you browse the internet with. I think SearXNG is really good if you setup a service on a server IP (like a VPS) and it gets used by multiple people, or if you tunnel it trough a VPN, but then again you could also just VPN your search engine searches.
So why do you like it? Is it for the aggregation of multiple engines? Or maybe the fact that it doesn’t link your specific browser to a search? I really wonder and am not hating.
IP in itself might not be as much of a problem, unless you have a static IP, which most consumers don’t. And even if you do, you are also hiding a lot of baggage relating to user agents or other fingerprintable settings. IP alone is rarely used as a sole point to link your traffic to other datapoints. On top of that, you can still just decide to exclude google, bing etc from your search results and rely more “open” ones like DDG or ecosia.
Another huge upside of searxng is the aggregation of results. The search results of google are all up to, well, google. Same with bing, which is controlled by microsoft. If these companies now decide to “surpress” certain information, people using only those engines directly would no longer see those news. However, if you get your results from multiple search engines, you are not - or lets say less - affected by that kind of nonsense.
As always with news and information, the truth usually lies somewhere in the middle. And that’s where searxng helps out tremendously.