Discussion summary
SearXNG is a customizable, open-source metasearch engine with various hosting options and user preferences. Users discuss configuring search sources, hosting, and alternatives like Brave Search and uruky.
What the discussion says
- Users want to customize search engines, e.g., only Stack Overflow and GitHub.
- Some prefer self-hosting for control and privacy.
- Alternatives like uruky and Brave Search are mentioned.
- Concerns about search result quality and reliability.
“How do I configure which search engines SearXNG pulls from?”
“I prefer 4get.”
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- Hacker News
- I’ve been a big fan of SearXNG for a while now. My distain for google has only grown, so having the ability to search and avoid things like yk, small AI models being installed on my PC without my consent, is awesome.by ninjahawk1
- It works well if you connect it the Brave Search API, but using it a scraper is fairly unreliable. Google stopped working a few days ago.by artooro
- TinySearch wraps this and works well for agents. It's better than the native SearXNG MCP because it optimizes the context before it even gets to the agent so as to not waste tokens.by satvikpendem
- I've been using searxng for several years now. I don't run my own instances because the inhumane network censorship imposed by GFW, and proxy detection enforced by search engines. Instead, I rely on public instances on the list [1] and libredirect [2]. Note that service from a single instance is not guaranteed, but you can always switch to other available instances with little cost within a minute.
I won't say searxng can help you degoogle because metasearch engine calls other search engines, e.g., google, to collect results. However, if you try searxng, you can at least get rid of things like ai reviews in no time.
In the end, thank you people after searxng project and public instances.
by RandyOrion - I've been self hosting this as my default engine across all of my searches for a few years now. I can't recommend it more highly.by dexterdog
- SearXNG is my daily internet search now +5 years; with YaCY Backends and else as fallback. I also build internal document search or RAG applications with this setup (SearXNG also support json results). However, there are some downer I accept because of privacy: 1. Its slower and the results are not that good then with others. But fast and good enough for most of my queries. 2. From time to time you get blocked on the duckduckgo, brave or whatever search and you must solve some captures. You can prevent this by getting and using API-Keys from them.
The nice thing about using your own backend is, that you can prio it in the results and for example, if I crawl the smallweb and other site important for myself, this sites come up first in the results.
by exiguus - This appears to be a key tool for providing search to local models.
I'm curious what setups folks use to provide this functionality.
Since the quantized 24B parameter Gemma model came out, I've had good luck with tool calling on a 4070 Ti Super.
Successful tool calling is what finally made the local experience useful.
I should note this is for the general and not coding specific context.
by goodroot - Ohi, I'm the original creator of Searx, but due to the limitations of the metasearch concept I'm not involved in the development anymore. My new search project is https://github.com/asciimoo/hister (https://hister.org/).
Hister is a full text indexer for websites and local files which automatically saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. Storing full page content allows serving offline result previews and the full page content via MCP.
Take a look at how the MCP can be utilized: https://hister.org/posts/give-your-ai-assistant-a-private-me...
by asciimoo