The instances that give the best results seem to also get throttled pretty often on the source search engines, to the point of near uselessness.
Thinking of hosting my own, but the maintenance seems pretty involved according to the docs.
What’s your experience been like?
Edit: all right y’all, thanks for the feedback. I’m going to spin up an instance.
I host it as a docker container and the maintenance has been painless
Same here. Once in a while I update the config with all the changed engines. But that’s about it.
Self hosting and the maintenance is painless, but the results have been pretty terrible lately
Why terrible?
Recently I’ll often get results that aren’t at all related to what I searched for. I also get a lot of timeouts from the upstream search engines, and sometimes I get results that are in Chinese for some reason
Interesting.
Is it still worth it though? Nice username btw lel
Lol, thanks. I think it’s still worth it if you want more ownership over your searches, but just expect some rough edges
Hey, I know you got a ton of replies but yeah, been using searXNG with a custom theme made by me and it’s basically identical to google (including the feeling lucky part lol)
Used it for months and it’s awesome, haven’t missed google at all.
The amazing thing about it is that with an instance of
meilisearchI was able to index all my media libraries/book libraries/game libraries and searching for!home <query>actually sarches within my home lab, which is a huge win for me.
Hope this helps give you an idea of how powerful this can be <3
The amazing thing about it is that with an instance of meilisearch I was able to index all my media libraries/book libraries/game libraries and searching for !home <query> actually sarches within my home lab, which is a huge win for me.
I’m intrigued. I’ve always wanted to point my search engine to my ebook library and be able to search them for data. Scrape my library as it were. I’ve also wanted to change the Searxng log as well, to personalize it.
Nice!
The only drawback I have had for heavily customising it is that it’s now not compatible with the latest versions, unfortunately they’ve re-structured their codebase and I frankly don’t have the time to re-do all my hard work, so I’ve been running a very old (but extremely stable) version of it lol
how do you theme it ive tried to add my own logo on the homepage but its always scaled wrong.
edit: spelling
I deployed it in a Docker container. It is my default search engine. I use it constantly. Besides Calibre & Navidrome, it’s one of my most heavily used, selfhosted apps.
I just have it running in a docker container…
I host my own SearXNG via docker compose, reverse proxied it via Traefik, added a few security headers, restricted access to my country to help prevent abuse.
Use it daily, the only complaint I really have is it occasionally doesn’t search when you type in the address bar of a browser. What I mean is I’ll type a search query and instead of redirecting to the query (searx.yourdomain.tld/search?q=test) it’ll just redirect to the homepage of my SearXNG instance (searx.yourdomain.tld) forcing me to retype my query. Annoying but not the end of the world.
searx.yourdomain.tld/search?q=test
Do you have the
%sin the search string:searx.yourdomain.tld/search?q=%s. For instance, in Firefox, when you add you searx instance, I had to add the%sto get it to search properly.Yup, it works 90% of the time. Happens on all devices so I suspect Searx is just running into an error of some sort. Too lazy to investigate.
This same behaviour happens to me, but only once in a while.
I wish we have a free to use, open source, and privacy respecting search engine that do the crawling and indexing and don’t rely on other search engines.
Maybe we can utilize all selfhosted instances to do the crawling and consolidate it.
Oh wouldn’t that be sweet, a federated web crawler
i been hosting my instance for a while its not on the main list but its still publicly accesible never had a issue with it
I’m running SearxNG as rootless docker container on my homelab for nearly 2 years now. I have connected it to Internet via VPN.
I have it setup on each of my laptops, so I have it available at all time with no need to expose it on my home setup.
Automatically start the container on my laptop, and add it to my browser’s search engines as default. Pretty simple.
I have it installed as a docker container on a server on my home network, and use it as my default search on my home machines, and access it on mobile through wireguard.
Its not that difficult, i have mine set up with gluetun and I’ve been using for more than 1 year now, sometimes i have some problem with the search terms and every engine gets broken but i just need to search with another name
Usually if this happens for me it’s an issue with the gluetun end, since all the big names love to throttle known VPNs. Fixes itself after a few minutes, but if I’m not feeling lazy a quick stack restart tends to fix it too.
I have deployed it using docker. But I am still having trouble setting it up with cloudflare and my domain.
The only annoyance I’ve had with it is searches will sometimes default to another language, even though I set the language to only return English results.
Also, I’ve found that the image/map search capabilities are less performant than googles.
But I still use it because the search results are so clean and no-frills.
I host and use it as my default search on all devices. Bare metal deployment. The maintenance is pretty low, I just run the instance update script from to time.
Results have been worse lately, I think it needs some tuning in regards to weights and what engines are in use.
