My latest Google search replacement recently made a decision that basically forces me to turn off ad block in order to click results. I was wondering if there was any self hosted solution that is fairly easy to deploy in TrueNAS scale or if it is even worth doing. Bonus points if it’s federated somehow. I’ll deal with bad results if it needs time to grow as a project.
I also want to add that what little self hosting I’ve done so far has felt like cutting out a festering cancer and it feels so good to be in control of my online life again. Thanks so much for the guidance since the Rexxit. Finding out that you could easily self host a Reddit replacement with other people was what got me going to into this to begin with.
Perhaps https://github.com/searxng/searxng ?
It looks like a few people are recommending this, so just a quick note in case people are unaware:
If you want to avoid being tracked, this is not a good solution. Searxng is a meta search engine, meaning it is effectively a proxy: you search on Searxng, it searches multiple sites and sends all the results back to you. If you use a public instance, you may be protected from the actual search engine*, because many people will use the same instance, and your queries will be mixed in with all of them. If you self host, however, all the searches will be your own - there is then no difference between using Searxng and just going to the site yourself.
*The caveat with using the public instances is while you may be protected from the upstream engine, you have to trust the admins - nothing stops them from tracking you themselves (or passing your data on).
Despite the claims in their docs, I would not consider this a privacy tool. If you are just looking for a good search engine, this may work, and it gives you flexibility and power to tune it yourself. But it’s probably not going to do anything good for your privacy, above and beyond what you can get from other meta search engines like Startpage and DuckDuckGo, or other “private” search engines like Brave.
I’m not an expert but one could funnel all web traffic through a VPN if they needed right? Gaining possibly even more obscurity and shifting the trust to a company vs a small user
(relative whether that’s an upgrade or not in privacy)
You mean between their instance and the final search engines? Or between them and a public instance of searxng?
In either case, I’m not sure it buys you anything in terms of privacy you wouldn’t get by using the VPN and going directly to the search engines.
I’m really happy with my searxng instance
I had no idea that was what that was. Learn something new every day.