the issue with SearX is the search results can be irrelevent or something random.
Haha, oh, right! I just remembered that often times when I searched something completely harmless some weird porn sites would appear in the results which had clearly absolutely nothing to do with the things I’ve been searching for. It’s one of the reasons why I stopped using SearX(NG).
You don’t need to do it with every version. I only patch a new version every 6 months. That’s more than enough.
Agreed. Still feels like nobody knows about Vanced’s successor.
Of course I did. The thing is that the reliability of the search engines per instance varies from time to time so there’s not a single instance that will always work perfectly and never has timeouts.
I think you can even port forward with the free plan of ProtonVPN.
The problem is that it doesn’t matter which instance I use. I tried multiple instances, even self-hosted one myself. Sooner or later I always had the problem with timeouts (even with my self-hosted local instance) and it’s so damn annoying. Even refreshing the page doesn’t always help. I really don’t feel like hopping from instance to instance just because my preferred instance has timeouts again. Reliability is crucial to me.
You can find many public hosted instances here but some of them use Cloudflare because they fear DDoS attacks. So keep that in mind when choosing your instance. Best is to host your own instance.
Some thoughts from a long term SearXNG user: While I really appreciate how privacy respecting SearXNG is I had a lot of trouble with it. Often enough you get 0 results because of timeouts with the search engines it uses and sometimes the order of the presented search results isn’t good. Sometimes the thing I’ve been searching for was the 10th result while in other search engines it was the first result. So the prioritizing of the results is often enough just odd.
We live in a time where there are so many search engines but all of them have their flaws. It’s really frustrating. :(
Been using a self hosted instance of SearXNG but recently went away from SearXNG in gerneral. Why? Search results more than often enough ended in timeouts from the search engines. It was frustrating and they never fixed it. In terms of privacy it’s top notch though.
I downloaded MiXplorer today. It’s really great. Thanks for the tip!
Interesting. Never heard of Beeper. Looks like they even have a client for desktops. Does it also cover (video) calls and screen sharing for Discord and/or Signal?
I can confirm that.
It’s fine but I wouldn’t judge if I had never tested it for a while. But whether you wanna give that search engine a chance or not is completely up to you ofc. :)
If you wanna know how it respects its user’s privacy you need to do some research as it’s a little complex. I don’t see where you get scammed just by using the search engine. It’s like you’re saying you got scammed by a car seller once so you’ll never make any other attempt to buy a car ever again.
In the meantime I got to understand why Kagi needs an account: It’s their business model. You have to pay to make searches that exceed the free 100 searches. So of course you need an account.
Sorry about that. I deleted my previous post because I thought it was an answer to another post. But you were faster with responding to it, haha. Yes, I understand their business model now. They want you to pay for a specific amount of searches. That’s how they cover the costs.
I see! Thanks for the clarification. I just checked their prices. Looks like you get X searches for a specific price. Not appealing to me but I bet many people are fine with that. I rather prefer a little bit of ads at the top of my search results (which I could block with an adblocker anytime) but that is just my personal preference.
How exactly am I the customer if they don’t track me? Do they display ads? How do they cover the costs for this search engine?
I’m not really understanding what you wanna tell me with “you are the customer”. They display ads at the top of your search results and that’s how they make money. Considering that, yes, you are the customer. But they don’t track you and your search queries are anonymized so they respect your privacy. With an adblocker you don’t even see the ads. You can make an account to earn PRE (the crypto currency they use) with your search queries. But you don’t need to do that. You could even run your own node server(s) and earn even more because you’re helping the search engine by being a part of the infrastructure. But you can ignore all that and just use the search engine.
Anyway I’m really satisfied with the search results. Didn’t even feel the need to switch to another search engine since I’ve started using it a few months ago.
It’s just Mullvad and you have to pay 10€. If you buy Mullvad’s VPN service directly from their website you only pay 5€ and you get much more with the client they offer. So if you ask me the better choice is obvious.