My Very Own Search Engine

This project has been stopped. It never worked well enough to justify the montly cost and maintenance. I may try again at some point in the future, but for now it’s on hold.

Search Sucks

Search sucks. Every search engine has problems. Google is going to sell every keystroke you make to advertisers and fill your results with ads. Microsoft is going to do the same but not as well. I happily used DuckDuckGo for a while but I have a problem with the deal they struck with Microsoft.

I don’t think any of that is worth the results those search engines give. But they’re basically utility companies on the modern internet. You have to search. How else would you find anything?

What You Should Do About It

Most people should honestly do one of two things: either suck it up and use Google or change to DuckDuckGo for more, if not quite complete privacy. Either way you can use them as default search in any modern web browser and you’ll get acceptable results for most queries.

What I Did About It

I happened upon this video. I followed it step by step: setting up a Linode instance, configuring it, setting up docker and SearxNG, etc. Now I have my own private meta-search engine that does not collect my search history or keystrokes. It doesn’t serve ads and doesn’t sell my info. And the best part is that it searches multiple sites (google, duckduckgo, wikipedia, etc.) all at once. It works really well.

Downsides

There are two downsides to this setup. First, I do have to pay for the Linode instance. I got a pretty great free trial but once that’s over this server is $5 a month. It’s not much but most people aren’t going to pay $60/year for private search that they have to maintain themselves - I do have to make sure the server is updated and pay for the domain name.

The other problem is convenience. There is currently no easy way to make my search engine the default in any browser on desktop or mobile. I can’t just type a search in the search bar… If I want to use it I have to go to the actual site and use the search bar.

Finally

I do really like knowing that I’m not going to get ads based on what I search for - nothing is creepier than that. I plan on keeping the site up (and updated) for the foreseeable future.

Feel free to use the site for your searches, too. It is at nfsearch [dot] org¹.