7 ms·

Searx is no longer maintained

135 points by Jefrodey 3y ago

rovr138 3y ago
From the README, > What is the difference between searx and SearxNG? > TL;DR: SearXNG is for users that want more features and bugs getting fixed quicker. If you prefer a minimalist software and stable experience, use searx. > SearxNG is a fork of searx, created by a former maintainer of searx. The fork was created because the majority of the maintainers at the time did not find the new proposed features privacy respecting enough. The most significant issue is with engine metrics. > Searx is built for privacy conscious users. It comes with a unique set of challenges. One of the problems we face is that users rather not report bugs, because they do not want to publicly share what engines they use or what search query triggered a problem. It is a challenge we accepted. > The new metrics feature collects more information to make engine maintenance easier. We could have had better and more error reports to benefit searx maintainers. However, we believe that the users of searx must come first, not the software. We are willing to compromise on the lack of issue reports to avoid violating the privacy of users. > Furthermore, SearxNG is under heavy refactoring and dependencies are constantly updated, even if it is unnecessary. It increases the risk of introducing regressions. In searx we strive for stability, rather than moving fast and breaking things. https://github.com/searxng/searxng https://github.com/searxng/searxng
- ozarker 3y ago
  I’ve been using searxng for a while. It works very well in my experience
  - rovr138 3y ago
    Same here. Happy to see there's at least a shoutout on the home with it being marked as not longer maintained.
- i_read_news 3y ago
  From my understanding, the metrics from SearxNG are still privacy respecting, and searx never clearly defined what constitutes privacy enforcement or drew a clear line. Most active developers went to SearxNG for that reason, and searx was largely in maintenance mode for a long time. I had recently asked to clear the confusion, and honestly just made me think searx was passively abandoned already - they just made it official.
  - johnklos 3y ago
    From my reading of things, they (SearX) wanted to protect us (the people who use SearX) from ourselves (the people who run SearX). In other words, marketing BS. If I don't want aggregate stats, I won't collect them. I'm a big person now and can decide that for myself, thanks.
- unixfox 3y ago
  Maybe I'm biased because I'm a SearXNG maintainer, but I don't fully agree with the comparison done by SearX team. Not reporting the problems in the engines do not benefit to the users, if nothing works why use SearX in the first place then? I would even say it's a major advantage to have the ability to quickly and easily report the issue, this way the users are all getting quick fixes as soon as something break. We rely on unstable API or ways to extract the results from the engines, it doesn't make any sense to not have a system that allow to report the instabilities. It is true that SearXNG code base change a lot faster than SearX one when it was still actively maintained, but that's because our users want to see the software evolve to new needs, and like I said above relying on unstable ways to extract the data require us to improve the software so that it still works with the engines we rely on. A major feature we added is the new anti bot available on the public instances, it allows having public instances that work with almost all the engines instead of getting errors all over the place because bots were abusing the instance.
Havoc 3y ago
Found the NG version to be pretty usable. The troubles start when you realise you also need to pipe this through a reputable vpn to get any real privacy. Noticeably more lag and unpredictable performance. Think it had something to do with the vpn connection being up multiple days. Seemed to degrade over time
- KetoManx64 3y ago
  Why do you need to pipe it through a VPN?
kornhole 3y ago
In addition to SearxNG, Librex is another authoritative metasearch engine I use. It is configurable in different ways and includes torrents. Brave, Quant, Yandex, and Mojeek are other centralized engines that do not rely on Google or Bing TMK. I also run Yacy.net instance which is decentralized and federated. I crawl the sites I want to include as do the other operators. It is good for non-authoritative searches for topics that might be suppressed in centralized search engines.
- mble 3y ago
  Not only for topics that are suppressed, but also topics that are very niche. I played around with yacy to crawl for documentation of mechanical switches for my project - keycomp.co. It is awesome that you can just put few websites that you want to crawl, even edit its robots.txt and collect all of the data you need. Only issue is that it is very easy to just run out of storage, and even if you have that problem under control, there is an issue with yacy randomly crashing.
- DoItToMe81 3y ago
  How big would you say Yacy's resource hogging is nowadays? I was considering running an instance years ago but I was told horror stories of it using 4 gb of ram at minimum.
  - kornhole 3y ago
    Yes it is RAM intensive but depends on usage. When my instance is not being used much, it is consuming 1GB. I haven't seen high usage and RAM spikes as I have not published my instance to the world to use.
crazypython 3y ago
https://Kagi.com https://Kagi.com and https://metaphor.systems https://metaphor.systems have been doing a great job for me
- romanshrompsky 3y ago
  Kagi ftw I rarely use another search engine.
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  Have you tried Phind? I'm curious how you find the two (Metaphor and Phind). I'm debating dropping Phind, i weirdly prefer raw ChatGPT. Curious how Metaphor is
  - rushingcreek 3y ago
    Phind co-founder here. May I ask why you’re considering dropping Phind and what we can do to improve?
    - unshavedyak 3y ago
      Two main things: 1. It sits in the "money for AI" fund from me. Ie it competes with ChatGPT. While it uses OpenAI in the background, i have not found it to be as complete and useful as ChatGPT directly. I did cancel ChatGPT for a couple months to try out Phind instead because Phind can search, and i find that missing from ChatGPT of course (at least until they have the module back). I'm on the pro plan of Phind, fwiw. Hypothetically it could (maybe, i'm assuming) be as valuable for my ChatGPT use cases, but i found that i couldn't just give it the same input i'd give ChatGPT, as Phind would then search for an answer and come back with.. well, things from the internet which wasn't what i was wanting from that ChatGPT interface. I struggle to think of an example, though.. so hopefully this vague description is still of use hah. 2. Where Phind excels of course is digging answers out of the web, finding API solutions, wiring those results up into code, etc. However unfortunately this still seems a complex task. I do not find Phind to be accurate enough. It usually does a decent job at inferring the solution from the results, but it struggles with knowing library versions, context of the search results, etc. I find myself using Phind primarily as a quick jumping off point for search results.. but i still often need to still search myself to figure out the actual code. So when i feel like i still need to search anyway, and that i feel i gave up ChatGPT for Phind (due to item #1), then it's just a tough position to justify Phind over CGPT for me. For context usually i'm using and searching about Rust. Fwiw i've still not decided one way or another. Though i'm definitely on the fence. Hope this vague and off the top of my head post helps a bit.
andrewmcwatters 3y ago
Was this supposed to be pronounced "search?" Or literally, "sear-ecks?" Was SearXNG supposed to be pronounced "sear-ecks-en-gee?"
- killingtime74 3y ago
  Now its unmaintained, I guess who cares XD
- jrflowers 3y ago
  It rhymes with “lurks”
- tyler_sf 3y ago
  I've always pronounced it as "serks." I never knew if I was saying it right.
  - ljm 3y ago
    To this day people are either saying SQL or sequel. The point being.. prescribing language is pointless. People will say what they will.
    - mc32 3y ago
      If people had direction or inkling they might go along with it and not wonder if they’re going to be understood or not. But I get your point. I say ‘kwebek’ and not ‘kebek’ and ‘MAdrid’ not maDRID.
      - SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
        Hmm those ar least have locals who ostensibly have a bit more authority on the matter that can be leaned on for backup than just your average layman’s pronunciation. Not so with “Ess cue ell” and “sequel” which feels like more of a free for all and cultural battle
        3y ago
CodyBierman77 3y ago
Encrypted proxy and Tor based search engines are popping up with solid masking technology. Torry.io is my preferred proxy over StartPage. StartPage proxy is operated by an adtech firm
sassy_quat 3y ago
[dead]
Zetobal 3y ago
"now" it's on life support for years.

135 points by Jefrodey 3y ago

From the README, > What is the difference between searx and SearxNG? > TL;DR: SearXNG is for users that want more features and bugs getting fixed quicker. If you prefer a minimalist software and stable experience, use searx. > SearxNG is a fork of searx, created by a former maintainer of searx. The fork was created because the majority of the maintainers at the time did not find the new proposed features privacy respecting enough. The most significant issue is with engine metrics. > Searx is built for privacy conscious users. It comes with a unique set of challenges. One of the problems we face is that users rather not report bugs, because they do not want to publicly share what engines they use or what search query triggered a problem. It is a challenge we accepted. > The new metrics feature collects more information to make engine maintenance easier. We could have had better and more error reports to benefit searx maintainers. However, we believe that the users of searx must come first, not the software. We are willing to compromise on the lack of issue reports to avoid violating the privacy of users. > Furthermore, SearxNG is under heavy refactoring and dependencies are constantly updated, even if it is unnecessary. It increases the risk of introducing regressions. In searx we strive for stability, rather than moving fast and breaking things. https://github.com/searxng/searxng https://github.com/searxng/searxng

ozarker 3y ago
I’ve been using searxng for a while. It works very well in my experience
- rovr138 3y ago
  Same here. Happy to see there's at least a shoutout on the home with it being marked as not longer maintained.
i_read_news 3y ago
From my understanding, the metrics from SearxNG are still privacy respecting, and searx never clearly defined what constitutes privacy enforcement or drew a clear line. Most active developers went to SearxNG for that reason, and searx was largely in maintenance mode for a long time. I had recently asked to clear the confusion, and honestly just made me think searx was passively abandoned already - they just made it official.
- johnklos 3y ago
  From my reading of things, they (SearX) wanted to protect us (the people who use SearX) from ourselves (the people who run SearX). In other words, marketing BS. If I don't want aggregate stats, I won't collect them. I'm a big person now and can decide that for myself, thanks.
unixfox 3y ago
Maybe I'm biased because I'm a SearXNG maintainer, but I don't fully agree with the comparison done by SearX team. Not reporting the problems in the engines do not benefit to the users, if nothing works why use SearX in the first place then? I would even say it's a major advantage to have the ability to quickly and easily report the issue, this way the users are all getting quick fixes as soon as something break. We rely on unstable API or ways to extract the results from the engines, it doesn't make any sense to not have a system that allow to report the instabilities. It is true that SearXNG code base change a lot faster than SearX one when it was still actively maintained, but that's because our users want to see the software evolve to new needs, and like I said above relying on unstable ways to extract the data require us to improve the software so that it still works with the engines we rely on. A major feature we added is the new anti bot available on the public instances, it allows having public instances that work with almost all the engines instead of getting errors all over the place because bots were abusing the instance.

Havoc 3y ago

Found the NG version to be pretty usable. The troubles start when you realise you also need to pipe this through a reputable vpn to get any real privacy. Noticeably more lag and unpredictable performance. Think it had something to do with the vpn connection being up multiple days. Seemed to degrade over time

KetoManx64 3y ago
Why do you need to pipe it through a VPN?

kornhole 3y ago

In addition to SearxNG, Librex is another authoritative metasearch engine I use. It is configurable in different ways and includes torrents. Brave, Quant, Yandex, and Mojeek are other centralized engines that do not rely on Google or Bing TMK. I also run Yacy.net instance which is decentralized and federated. I crawl the sites I want to include as do the other operators. It is good for non-authoritative searches for topics that might be suppressed in centralized search engines.

mble 3y ago
Not only for topics that are suppressed, but also topics that are very niche. I played around with yacy to crawl for documentation of mechanical switches for my project - keycomp.co. It is awesome that you can just put few websites that you want to crawl, even edit its robots.txt and collect all of the data you need. Only issue is that it is very easy to just run out of storage, and even if you have that problem under control, there is an issue with yacy randomly crashing.
DoItToMe81 3y ago
How big would you say Yacy's resource hogging is nowadays? I was considering running an instance years ago but I was told horror stories of it using 4 gb of ram at minimum.
- kornhole 3y ago
  Yes it is RAM intensive but depends on usage. When my instance is not being used much, it is consuming 1GB. I haven't seen high usage and RAM spikes as I have not published my instance to the world to use.

crazypython 3y ago

https://Kagi.com https://Kagi.com and https://metaphor.systems https://metaphor.systems have been doing a great job for me

romanshrompsky 3y ago
Kagi ftw I rarely use another search engine.
unshavedyak 3y ago
Have you tried Phind? I'm curious how you find the two (Metaphor and Phind). I'm debating dropping Phind, i weirdly prefer raw ChatGPT. Curious how Metaphor is
- rushingcreek 3y ago
  Phind co-founder here. May I ask why you’re considering dropping Phind and what we can do to improve?
  - unshavedyak 3y ago
    Two main things: 1. It sits in the "money for AI" fund from me. Ie it competes with ChatGPT. While it uses OpenAI in the background, i have not found it to be as complete and useful as ChatGPT directly. I did cancel ChatGPT for a couple months to try out Phind instead because Phind can search, and i find that missing from ChatGPT of course (at least until they have the module back). I'm on the pro plan of Phind, fwiw. Hypothetically it could (maybe, i'm assuming) be as valuable for my ChatGPT use cases, but i found that i couldn't just give it the same input i'd give ChatGPT, as Phind would then search for an answer and come back with.. well, things from the internet which wasn't what i was wanting from that ChatGPT interface. I struggle to think of an example, though.. so hopefully this vague description is still of use hah. 2. Where Phind excels of course is digging answers out of the web, finding API solutions, wiring those results up into code, etc. However unfortunately this still seems a complex task. I do not find Phind to be accurate enough. It usually does a decent job at inferring the solution from the results, but it struggles with knowing library versions, context of the search results, etc. I find myself using Phind primarily as a quick jumping off point for search results.. but i still often need to still search myself to figure out the actual code. So when i feel like i still need to search anyway, and that i feel i gave up ChatGPT for Phind (due to item #1), then it's just a tough position to justify Phind over CGPT for me. For context usually i'm using and searching about Rust. Fwiw i've still not decided one way or another. Though i'm definitely on the fence. Hope this vague and off the top of my head post helps a bit.

andrewmcwatters 3y ago

Was this supposed to be pronounced "search?" Or literally, "sear-ecks?" Was SearXNG supposed to be pronounced "sear-ecks-en-gee?"

killingtime74 3y ago
Now its unmaintained, I guess who cares XD
jrflowers 3y ago
It rhymes with “lurks”
tyler_sf 3y ago
I've always pronounced it as "serks." I never knew if I was saying it right.
- ljm 3y ago
  To this day people are either saying SQL or sequel. The point being.. prescribing language is pointless. People will say what they will.
  - mc32 3y ago
    If people had direction or inkling they might go along with it and not wonder if they’re going to be understood or not. But I get your point. I say ‘kwebek’ and not ‘kebek’ and ‘MAdrid’ not maDRID.
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
      Hmm those ar least have locals who ostensibly have a bit more authority on the matter that can be leaned on for backup than just your average layman’s pronunciation. Not so with “Ess cue ell” and “sequel” which feels like more of a free for all and cultural battle
      - 3y ago

CodyBierman77 3y ago

Encrypted proxy and Tor based search engines are popping up with solid masking technology. Torry.io is my preferred proxy over StartPage. StartPage proxy is operated by an adtech firm

sassy_quat 3y ago

[dead]

Zetobal 3y ago

"now" it's on life support for years.