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Isn’t hosting your own instance taking away every benefit of searx by revealing your IP? If you had a VPN you’d use it to mask your IP from tracking of search e

Isn’t hosting your own instance taking away every benefit of searx by revealing your IP? If you had a VPN you’d use it to mask your IP from tracking of search engines anyway, and if you used Tor for it, you’d probably move back soon since it’ll be so much worst with latency, like how many people go back to google because DDG sucks for results. I suggest just using instances you can find them at https://searx.space https://searx.space some are more reliable than others but none have been trouble free. There’s a lot of these instances for privacy, chrome has a privacy plugin with a white eye that uses nitter.net for Twitter, teddit for Reddit and other public instances. One instance of Reddit was even made completely in rust. ;) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-redirect/pmcmeagblkinmogikoikkdjiligflglb?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-redirect/p... To reply to the person under me, you’re always relying on a trust in something unverified and untrustworthy filters like VPNs anyway, you’re either revealing your IP using a wrapper that reveals it instantly, use a site that isn’t a search engine and might be using your data, using a VPN that is based on reputable and assumptions, usually based in another country you won’t visit or know much about aside from random reviewers, or using Tor, losing latency, reasonable speed image search, and still be possibly compromised.

kleinsch 5y ago
But if you’re using instances someone else is hosting, aren’t you hitting half the author’s objections? - They may be hosted in the US - They may be hosted on AWS - You have no idea if the maintainer of the instance is tracking you
- jarvuschris 5y ago
  ^ This right here. This article is pretty hogwash IMO Points 1 and 3 aren't relevant if they aren't recording the data. Companies in other jurisdictions have no magic invulnerability you can trust to their data getting out (legally or illegally) if they're storing it. Points 2 and 5 are equally true of any open source project unless you run it yourself from source. There are _plenty_ of examples of users getting phished by maliciously built/hosted open source tools Point 4 is obviously not malicious tracking and a mistake any project could make At the end of the day though, unless you're going to run everything yourself (which most people aren't) you have to pick who to trust -- some random person running a server somewhere, or a company with hundreds of employees recruited under the premise of working on a privacy-centric search engine who could all turn whistleblower

kleinsch 5y ago

But if you’re using instances someone else is hosting, aren’t you hitting half the author’s objections? - They may be hosted in the US - They may be hosted on AWS - You have no idea if the maintainer of the instance is tracking you

jarvuschris 5y ago
^ This right here. This article is pretty hogwash IMO Points 1 and 3 aren't relevant if they aren't recording the data. Companies in other jurisdictions have no magic invulnerability you can trust to their data getting out (legally or illegally) if they're storing it. Points 2 and 5 are equally true of any open source project unless you run it yourself from source. There are _plenty_ of examples of users getting phished by maliciously built/hosted open source tools Point 4 is obviously not malicious tracking and a mistake any project could make At the end of the day though, unless you're going to run everything yourself (which most people aren't) you have to pick who to trust -- some random person running a server somewhere, or a company with hundreds of employees recruited under the premise of working on a privacy-centric search engine who could all turn whistleblower