Chucho's place / Posts / A personal website for chucho

Why I recommend using Searx?

2020-09-04

Why I recommend using Searx?

Important note

English is not my mother tongue and I will make grammar mistakes for sure. In any way I hope you forgive me for that. If you think I am making a mistake you should contact me here

Reasons for change

Hello, I remember, how websites were in the 90s, when the leaders were Altavista and Yahoo. I also somewhat remember the case, when Google tried to sell their search engine to Altavista and they didn’t want to buy it. Today the owners of Altavista should be regreting their call. The fact is, that Google was a company, which I quite liked, especially because of the support, which it used to give to the FOSS world, but a few years ago until today it has become a complete monster.

Today there few alternatives to Google, Duckduckgo may be the strongest one but you know what? I do not trust in Duckduckgo either for these reasons:

  1. The searcher is proprietary software.
  2. They promise they never store your data but that is something that we would never know and there are rumors about Apple interesting in buy Duckduckgo. I do not trust enough in Duckduckgo but I really do not trust in Apple.
  3. They also have privacy problems.
  4. I used to trust Google and now I hate it, in the past Google said “Don’t be the evil” and now they shit in your privacy. I don’t want the same thing with Duckduckgo despite of their promises. I just use proprietary software when I do need it but I do not trust in proprietary software so I always look for the libre alternative.

Alternatives

It seems, there is not decent libre searcher but there are metasearch engines, the alternatives I know are:

  1. Metager
  2. Searx

Both are licensed under AGPL. I personally use Searx because I liked more but the other option is also good.

Features

  1. Self hosted
  2. No user tracking
  3. No user profiling
  4. About 70 supported search engines
  5. Easy integration with any search engine
  6. Cookies are not used by default
  7. Secure, encrypted connections (HTTPS/SSL)
  8. Hosted by organizations, such as La Quadrature du Net, which promote digital rights

How to use it

There are two ways:

  1. Install your instance. Recommended.
  2. Use a public instance.

I personally use the instance searx.be because it comes by default in Librewolf, I trust Librewolf and I don’t want to install my own instance.

You can go to “settings” and choose the search engine that you like, I personally choosed Duckduckgo (I don’t trust Duckduckgo but I would rather instead of Google), the main difference between using Searx and Duckduckgo directly is that Searx acts as a Proxy between you and Search engines, so in theory other search engines would not know who made the search.

Conclusions

Although there is no decent free search engine, we have a meta search engine that tries to protect our privacy as much as possible. We also have the option to use the search engine of your choice if you have adapted to Duckduckgo recently you can use it with Searx.

Prev How to modify ncspot AUR package with alsa backend support Next The web sucks

Copyright © 2022 Jesús Ballesteros. / Power by Hugo / Theme SK1 by J-Siu / Licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0 / This site is html pure so there is no cookies, analytics or crap tools to store information from you. I do not care who enters or not. If I talk about privacy respect I should apply the same in my website. I also disabled all the crap that would violate privacy in Hugo, more information: https://gohugo.io/about/hugo-and-gdpr.