Google’s results have been getting worse over time, but it seems like the last couple years, they’ve taken a steep nose-dive, completely overrun with crappy content farming.

I’ve mitigated a lot of that by doing searches for any kind of product comparison or technical question with “site:reddit.com”, but now with the possibility that that trick will become less useful over time as well…?

Yeah. What search engines are other tech folks using?

  • AtomHeartFather
    15•1 year ago

    I really like SearXNG for searching. It combines results from multiple search engines (that you define) and strips out advertisements. You can host your own SearXNG instance if you are in to self hosting, or you can use one of the many available public instances.

    • @jason
      9•1 year ago

      SearXNG has come a long way. I self-host, and I consistently get more reliable results than when I use Google, and you can set it to replace something like twitter.com with nitter.net or reddit.com with teddit.net, so you can still visit those sites automatically on mobile (not sure, but that might be a self-host only thing).

      • @[email protected]
        1•1 year ago

        Thanks for the tip! Just set up my docker container. How do you configure the hostname replacements? In the UI Preferences menu, there’s just a toggle switch for “Hostname Replace”, but nowhere to input a list of names.

        • @jason
          1•1 year ago

          Not sure if you can see this since beehaw defederated us, but just add/edit the following in your settings.yml file in the searxng folder. The following redirects only reddit & twitter:

          enabled_plugins:
   - 'Hostname replace'

hostname_replace:
#   '(.*\.)?youtube\.com$': 'invidious.example.com'
#   '(.*\.)?youtu\.be$': 'invidious.example.com'
#   '(.*\.)?youtube-noocookie\.com$': 'yotter.example.com'
   '(.*\.)?reddit\.com$': 'teddit.net'
   '(.*\.)?redd\.it$': 'teddit.net'
   '(www\.)?twitter\.com$': 'nitter.net'
#   # to remove matching host names from result list, set value to false
#   'spam\.example\.com': false
   '(.*\.)?pinterest\.com': false
   '(.*\.)?instagram\.com': false
      • @[email protected]
        1•1 year ago

        Thank you for this! Never heard of SearXNG until this thread. Sounds promising if you can use these replacement sites.

    • @[email protected]
      0•1 year ago

      What are the privacy implications of you being the only person using an instance? I was under the impression that part of the privacy from SearXNG was by obfuscation because of many different people searching from the the same instance. I thought about self hosting it, but didn’t want to share with the vps I pay for now.

      • AtomHeartFather
        1•1 year ago

        I guess at the end of the day that I don’t have many concerns for privacy. I am not searching for things that might get me on a watch list. Searching from my private instance is no more/less secure in terms of privacy than it would be if I did a Google search. The search endpoints (Google, Bing, DDG, etc) all know the IP that the search is coming from even if its passing through SearXNG first. So if I was doing something shady, I could easily be tracked down that way.

        The main reason I run my own SearXNG is so I can strip ads and search multiple search providers from a single search.