Service Recommendations Started Aug 19, 2026 6:44 PM

Search Engines

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Aug 19, 2026 6:44 PM
#1

What do you use for a search engine? I used to use searx but I can't find any stable instances anymore. It seems like the project has mostly been abandoned, at least as far as public instances go. I may spin up my own instance, but that would either not be very anonymous or collapse if it were open for public use. In the meantime, I've been using DDG and Startpage, but they are both owned by israelis, I think.

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Aug 19, 2026 9:08 PM
#2

@bulletbill22 couldn't it be made not publicly available if running your own?

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Aug 19, 2026 9:21 PM
#3

Brave is the best.

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Aug 19, 2026 9:27 PM
#4

searx been abandonned, it's been searxng for awhile now, it's still maintained, github still active
the instances you seeing are probably the searxng instances already anyways, idk

like... i dont really use search engine for awhile now... it's been so bad, like, trying to do a tech search thing and the results are about trump and tarrifs then the political news articles links... even for a literal tech search thing... search engines been so so bad for few years now

and like, lately if wanting to find like an old reddit reddit link or somethin, instead of typing in search engine site:reddit.com keywordsthen just asking llm "what's that reddit link thing about this and that from around that time" or something like that and llm does the webfetches to find the links

but yea else i guess searxng, ddg and startpage would be my goto as well, just not doing much googling lately i guess

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Aug 19, 2026 10:15 PM
#5

@nemesis

Yes, but then it wouldn't be anonymous. Part of the reason I don't want to use e.g. google is because of that.

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Aug 19, 2026 10:33 PM
#6

@bulletbill22 Ok I'm confused. If you run it on your own hardware, and its not publicly available, how is it not anonymous? And I'm asking seriously. I'm not seeing the issue here.

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Aug 19, 2026 10:48 PM Edited Aug 19, 2026 10:48 PM
#7

@nemesis
it's not a search engine on it's own kinda but does send requests to other search engines and aggregate that
so by being a public instance, you're blending with the other users of your instance
if the only user of your instance then it's still the 1 instance with it's own ip thing
can be ran through tor and whatnot tho

like, it's anonymizing the users of the instance but the instance itself is still 1 instance type thing

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Aug 19, 2026 11:13 PM Edited Aug 19, 2026 11:19 PM
#8

@GamingResearchLab Yea I know how it works, I use searxng, just wasnt sure what you meant exactly or what I was missing

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Aug 20, 2026 12:18 AM
#9

Duckduckgo: Mix (some data taken from microsoft bing, and other third party)
Brave: they said they indexed the data themself
Startpage: google (they act as proxy from you and google)
SearXNG: it mixing the result from alot of source. and its open source (https://github.com/searxng/searxng)

source : https://privacygear.nl/en/reviews/search-engine-comparison

for choice what i was using, i using SearXNG from disroot (still not yet hosted it myself lol)
and mix of startpage and duckduckgo for some "hard search"

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Aug 20, 2026 2:54 AM
#10

@nemesis Searx aggregates results from other search engines. With multiple users, the engines it queries (e.g. google) won't be able to know which user sent the request, just that the request came from my instance. If there's only 1 user, then all requests from my instance are obviously from me.

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