I’m currently working on re-evaluating our search engine selection (reading privacy policies and all that good stuff), to see what to keep, remove, maybe add. I figured I might use some input from lemmy.

  • what do you use out of the ones we include? is anyone actually using search engines like qwant and metager?
  • do you add any search engine to librewolf?

if you’re curious bout my notes on this -> https://gitlab.com/librewolf-community/settings/-/issues/111

  • Adda@lemmy.ml
    1·
    3 years ago

    I personally use SearX as my primary search engine (one local instance, the default searx.be instance as a fallback). Sometimes, I use one of the following search engines as well, but generally, there is no need for them in my case (for some of them, I retrieve their results with my SearX search, anyway). I rarely get to the point where SearX cannot provide the required and satisfactory results and I have to search with some specific search engine. The search engines I currently have set up in all of my browsers on both desktops and mobile phones are:

    • SearX,
    • DuckDuckGo,
    • StartPage,
    • Qwant,
    • Metager and
    • some specific search shortcuts for a few websites (Wikipedia, Lemmy, …).

    I have one Whoogle instance set up too, just for testing purposes, though. And I love the idea of per website aggregated results provided by Gigablast, but Gigablast is way too slow to use regularly. Interesting idea, though.

  • BXM1X9UyZ588Yb7Ebgv@lemmy.ml
    1·
    3 years ago

    Maybe(to add): https://searx.neocities.org

    Policies:

    • Redirects users directly to a random selection of any known running server after entering query.
    • Requires Javascript.
    • Excludes servers with user tracking and analytics or are proxied through Cloudflare.

    I found this random Searx/SearXNG search engine redirector at https://searx.space under the About tab.

    To use it, I save the search redirector as a bookmark at https://searx.neocities.org/#q=%s&category_general=on

    I also turn on javascript on at searx.neocities.org because otherwise I have to type in my search query manually into a specific search instance.

    However if your threat model requires it, you can also go to the no-javascript version of searx.neocities.org. You will not be automatically redirected to a random Searx instance when using no-JS version.

    I type in a keyword in the url bar and then the service redirects me to a random Searx/SearXNG instance. For load balancing purposes, it seems great since no single server will be stressed significantly. The searches are spread across multiple instances.

    Sometimes the redirected Searx/SearXNG instances output bad results(e.g. errors). In that case, just use the Searx redirector again to have new random Searx/SearXNG instance.