3 ms·

In short, you have no trust on public instances. Check the documentation for details: https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/user/own-instance.html https://asciimoo.g

by teddet 10y ago

In short, you have no trust on public instances. Check the documentation for details: https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/user/own-instance.html https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/user/own-instance.html

notheguyouthink 10y ago
On that note, i wonder if you could build a secondary search engine at your home, but only index a small part of the web you typically use? This immediately sounds useless, but for me i feel[1] like i primarily search a handful of sites. If i can index the sites i mainly care about, and fallback to "normal" engines automatically or with a flag, then for the queries i care about suddenly i get 100% accurate[2] and 100% private searches. This seems like a good idea to me. My only question, is how much bandwidth and storage are needed to even index something like reddit? If it's too much to run on a moderate home computer, then what's the use? [1]: I don't have any data to back up this claim, though. Purely a hunch. [2]: edit, well i guess 100% accurate depends on the search implementation, but it's still 100% private :)
- mistermann 10y ago
  Maybe a private instance of a cloud-based server paid for by like-minded subscribers?
- garysieling 10y ago
  If you only use a handful of sites, you can also solve this problem by building yourself a site that handles specific types of queries. I'm doing something like this, by building a site to search lectures (https://www.findlectures.com https://www.findlectures.com). The "fallback" for me is to just use youtube, etc instead. Rather than trying to index everything on Reddit or Youtube, if you just index "good" parts it's a lot easier, since there is a lot of low quality material either way. I think you're more limited by bandwidth, for what you can get into your own index. A search index is basically a mapping of hashed search tokens -> urls, so it can be pretty efficient to store locally (e.g. for a video search engine, you just need unique words in the transcript/title, not the entire video)

by teddet 10y ago

In short, you have no trust on public instances. Check the documentation for details: https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/user/own-instance.html https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/user/own-instance.html

notheguyouthink 10y ago

On that note, i wonder if you could build a secondary search engine at your home, but only index a small part of the web you typically use? This immediately sounds useless, but for me i feel[1] like i primarily search a handful of sites. If i can index the sites i mainly care about, and fallback to "normal" engines automatically or with a flag, then for the queries i care about suddenly i get 100% accurate[2] and 100% private searches. This seems like a good idea to me. My only question, is how much bandwidth and storage are needed to even index something like reddit? If it's too much to run on a moderate home computer, then what's the use? [1]: I don't have any data to back up this claim, though. Purely a hunch. [2]: edit, well i guess 100% accurate depends on the search implementation, but it's still 100% private :)

mistermann 10y ago
Maybe a private instance of a cloud-based server paid for by like-minded subscribers?
garysieling 10y ago
If you only use a handful of sites, you can also solve this problem by building yourself a site that handles specific types of queries. I'm doing something like this, by building a site to search lectures (https://www.findlectures.com https://www.findlectures.com). The "fallback" for me is to just use youtube, etc instead. Rather than trying to index everything on Reddit or Youtube, if you just index "good" parts it's a lot easier, since there is a lot of low quality material either way. I think you're more limited by bandwidth, for what you can get into your own index. A search index is basically a mapping of hashed search tokens -> urls, so it can be pretty efficient to store locally (e.g. for a video search engine, you just need unique words in the transcript/title, not the entire video)