this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
325 points (97.9% liked)

Privacy

31803 readers
111 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

Chat rooms

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
325
if you looking for a good alternative for google search, try "SearXNG" (lemmy.ca)
submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
113 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

actually awesome and fast search engine (depending on which instance you use) with no trashy AI and ADs results also great for privacy, if you don't know which instance to use go to https://searx.space/ and choose an instance closest to you

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Aren't all search queries available to whoever hosts an instance? In my eyes this is much worse to privacy and a much bigger risk unless you really know who is behind your chosen instance. I would trust some a company a bit more with safeguarding this information so it does not leak to some random guy.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I've always gotten the impression it was mostly intended to be self hosted. I've self hosted it for something like a couple years now, runs like a clock. It still strips out tracking and advertising, even if you don't get the crowd anonymity of a public instance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Self hosting doesn’t make sense as a privacy feature because then it’s still just you making requests to google/other SE

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

It's not useless, it removes a lot of the tracking cookies and such and sponsored links loaded with telemetry. Theoretically you can also get the benefits of anonymity if you proxy through Tor or a VPN, which I originally tried to do but turns out Google at least blocks requests from Tor and at least the VPN endpoint I have and probably most of them. Google or whatever upstream SE can still track you by IP when you self host, but its tracking is going to much less without the extra telemetry cookies and tracking code it gets when you use Google results directly.

But yes, practically you either have to trust the instance you're using to some extent or give up some of the anonymity. I opted to self host and would recommend the same over using a public instance if you can, personally. And if privacy is your biggest concern, only use upstream search providers that are (or rather, claim to be) more privacy respecting like DDG or Qwant. My main use case is primarily as a better frontend to search without junk sponsored results and privacy is more of a secondary benefit.

FWIW, they have a pretty detailed discussion on why they recommend self-hosting here.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (5 children)

As someone who hosts an instance, news to me lol

Edit: Developer says this can't be done currently? Reddit comment

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Of course it can be done, check your web server logs.

If you are using GET requests to send search queries to searxng, what you searched for will show up in the logs as

2024-10-31 123.321.0.100 /?query=kinky+furry+pictures

If you use POST requests the server admin can also easily enable logging those.

People hosting searxng can absolutely see what you searched for, along with your IP address, user agent string etc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Well my instance’s logs are sent to null for this reason already, but thank you for the info!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Thanks for clarification and great that this is not included in project, but couldn't someone change the server side code and somehow see more info that goes through?

I know there is that HTML check in https://searx.space/ to see if search interface code is not heavily modified, but on server side anything could go on.

If requests are encrypted in a way that searxng does not see contents then it probably is not trivial to do, but there always is a possibility something clever could be done.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Companies are definitely selling your data. Use a VPN.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

A VPN will not save you, they are easily worse for privacy in terms of user tracking. It centralises your entire web traffic in a single place for the VPN provider to track (and potentially sell).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You either trust the ISP or a VPN. Its a tool not a blanket of protection. Opsec and knowing how to move is most important.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Mandy 13 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Man, i wish i had the same experiencr

The couple of times I tried it out, the search results where barely accurate

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

Try kagi. It's paid at $5/mo., but you get 300 searches to try it out.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 5 days ago (10 children)

I mean it's often better than nothing, but it is a meta search that still often uses Google or Bing to gather results. IMHO, cut off the need for that data on the whole and use an option like Mojeek

[–] [email protected] 66 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

For all their talk of doing things different with their own index and rankings. Mojeek is following exactly what Google did. It's still an ad based business model that makes users into products to be sold to advertisers. They're good now, while still trying to build market share. But once their investors get hungry, the enshitification will commence.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 days ago (11 children)

we make money mainly from our api, our investors are patient private capital and we don't take vc, appreciate your point but these are fundamentally different situations, our ads (when they run) will also be contextual so more of a ddg situation than a "makes users into products to be sold to advertisers"

fair enough if it's not for you though

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I don't know if the comparison is inaccurate.

You make money from advertising to your users ("ddg situation" notwithstanding), are beholden to your investors (private status notwithstanding) and need to see more users to increase revenue. The person above you is saying that this model is what will drive you to eventually be as bad as Google. Do you understand?

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (10 replies)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Mojeek is cool, but trying to search something in my first language results in 0 results find.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

which language are we talking?

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (8 children)

Been rocking self-hosted Searxng for the last 3 weeks now as my default search engine; it's as good or better than DDG and certainly better than Google. Results I need are usually within the first three items, no extraneous shit.

I thought I'd just try it out, but it's staying. The ability to tune the background engines is awesome. My search history is private (though I wasn't that worried about DDG, there was no way in fuck I was using Kagi) since it's running it's searches via a VPN and returning me results locally.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Why wouldn't you use Kagi?

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Anon518 3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

it’s as good or better than

It's only as good as the search engines you select. Which ones have you selected?

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I stopped using it not because of the results but because you couldn't swipe back without it sending you to the base website.

On DuckDuckGo (and google n others) a search is shown in the URL like looking for frog:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=frog&t=fpas&ia=web

However in SearXNG it just shows
https://searxng.world/search
Which I don't have an issue with, however when you click on a link and then go back to the search results it would have no idea what you searched for as it's not in the URL and show an error.

That aside, the UI is great. icons don't swap around on you like Google or have annoying popups about 'privacy' like DDG. On the topic of search results, it was good enough for me. Not great but then again there aren't any good search engines right now.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

it's like using google from 2000's; thanks for sharing

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

If you set it as your default search in chrome or such, it will convert the Google search bar in Android to a SearXNG search bar. I started using it a little while back. Firefox never did well for me on Android (I'm sure it's anecdotal)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I'd use it if its public instances didn't get rate-limited so often

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Whoogle is a good option for self hosting as well

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago (1 children)

load more comments
view more: next ›