How many of you have tried using SearXNG? It’s a meta search engine that pull data from a number of sources before ranking and displaying them. I really like the cached feature that tries to load the internet archive copy of the page.
It’s good and I use it but at the same time I have also noticed that specially Google results are sometimes absolutely bad compared to directly searching on Google, and I am talking so bad that it probably is on purpose.
But it’s fine because bangs will give you all the power
Just a few days ago I had commented elsewhere that, disappointed with recent Brave Search results, I should have used a meta search engine instead. Thanks to your post I stopped procrastinating and started trying a SearXNG instance as default search engine (just tweaking engine settings a bit), so far everything seems good, results are on point and in multiple languages (last time I had tried a meta search engine a few years ago I had to change manually the language for each search, and it was annoying given that I often search the web in at least three languages, sometimes four) and the uncluttered UI is very nice. I’ll test it out for a few days I guess, but the first impression is good.
I really tried to love it. I tweaked a lot of settings but i never quite got the results i wanted. I still have a selfhosted instance running for occasional use. But i mainly use DuckDuckGo now.
I use SearXNG since half a year or so I think. It can be a little bit slow at times and some source engines will be deactivated temporarily. But overall its good enough for my daily use. I don’t search the web too often anyway and often use the search on the services webpage directly (Steam, Wikipedia or other stuff in example). One can default to SearXNG and in some cases use DuckDuckGo or Startpage (instead Google) for alternative results.
However sometimes an instance is offline temporarily or forever (but never tested after forever, so not sure about that). In those cases I have to switch to a different instance in Firefox default search engine, which I have bookmarked a few to choose from. So be prepared.
Spun up the container about a week ago. Made it my default search in Firefox. So far I’ve been happy with the quality of the results although I will admit there is a perceptible lag when submitting searches, compared to google/bing/etc… I imagine that’s mostly to do with the fact that it’s waiting on multiple search engines to fill my request.
I do like it so far. I figure with some tuning I could get the response time down.
