Searx

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An open source decentralised search engine

Logo searx a.png
Website.png https://searx.me   RepositoryRdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
Started: 2014
Founder: Adam Tauber

Constitutes: search engine

Searx is an open source metasearch engine.

Origins

Searx is derived from seeks, which "aims to give the control of the ranking of results to the users. Seeks is a p2p pattern matching overlay network on top of existing search engines. It provides collaborative filtering regrouping users based on the similarity of their queries and letting them reorganize and evaluate the search results together."[1]

Blocking attempts by Google

Another reason to use different searx instances, and/or to run one's own, is that as of 2019, Google has begun to block some instances, including some of the IP addresses used by searx.me, from querying it, resulting in a "google (unexpected crash: CAPTCHA required)" error.[2] In response, some instances have been modified to silently skip trying to search with Google, even when it's the only engine specified.[3][4]

Instances

A list of working searx nodes can be found at:

Advantages

The most obvious advantage is as regards privacy and data retention. To order results to their personal liking users can run a Searx instance and specify their own rules. The installation scripts make this easy. This is an effective way to break out of the search bubble.

Many thanks to our Patrons who cover ~2/3 of our hosting bill. Please join them if you can.


References