Tag: search
Searx: moving away from DuckDuckGo
The metasearch engine open source project Searx might be what you are looking for in terms of private web search
I have been using DuckDuckGo as my search engine of choice for the last few years. Howerver, DuckDuckGo seems to have a few problems:
- It is based in the US, arguably not the most privacy-respecting jurisdiction in the world.
- Only part of their source code is open.
- Uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a cloud provider and Cloudfare CDS.
- It looks like their browser was caught tracking visited websites per user.
- At the end of the day, you can’t really know that they are telling the truth when they promise not to track you.
In this post, I’m discussing Searx, a better alternative to DuckDuckGo that is truly open and driven by the community.
Search functionality in a small website like mine is usually arguably useless. I, for once, never even care to check whether a specific website offers it. I find a post that interests me via a search engine or aggregator, navigate to the page, read the post and then leave. However, I am not against local, serverless indexing and searching, even though most search engines provide site-specific searches. That is why I moved the search function of this website to a local, JavaScript-based implementation. How to do it? Read on.