Posting self hosted software every day until we have communities - Day 5 - SearXNG

Hi, it’s me. Your favorite Digg user. Day 5. Let’s dive into my second favorite piece of selfhosted software: SearXNG (pronounced Searching if you were curious). This is a self-hosted metasearch engine that pulls results from a bunch of sources like Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo (and more) without handing your data over to any of them. It’s basically your own private Google, running on your server, so you decide what engines it queries and how results show up. No ads baked in, no tracking cookies, no AI summaries and full control over the whole thing. I’ve been using it for a couple years now, and the real win is privacy. SearXNG mixes sources to give broader coverage while keeping things relatively quick in terms getting your search results. Out of the box it’s solid for privacy since it doesn’t log your IP or queries on its end. You don't want solid, though. You want something more bulletproof. SearXNG fans out requests to multiple engines, which can actually make your footprint a bit bigger if those engines tie the dots back to you. More pings from your IP means more chances for profiling. To fix that, slap a VPN right in front of it. Route all SearXNG traffic through something like WireGuard, Mullvad, or ProtonVPN on your host machine. That way upstream engines see the VPN’s IP, not yours, and your searches stay obfuscated permanently. On the config side of things be sure to tweak settings.yml: * Kill SafeSearch to avoid filtered results. Under the search section, add safe_search: 0. * Your VPN is going to add a bit of lagtime. Bump up the timeouts. Set search_timeout: 5.0-10.0 for the whole query or engine_timeout: 10.0 per engine (like for slower ones such as Google) For everyday use it slots right into your normal workflow. I use librewolf on all devices short of my iphone, so someone else will need to speak up on how other browsers handle custom search engines. Making it your Firefox default search engine is really easy. Apple devices work pretty well with the xEngine app if you're deadset on using safari. * about:preferences#search, scroll to Search Shortcuts, click Add, paste your SearXNG URL like https://searxng.dankone.lan/search?q=%s, name it "SearXNG" Power users can script engine rotations or hook it into automation for site-specific searches, but even basic setup is more than enough for 99% of users. GitHub repo: https://github.com/searxng/searxng