Google is bad, but people have no idea how bad search could actually get. Trying to find DPRK housing stats and DDG will only give me pages about recent canadian housing news.
Google is bad, but people have no idea how bad search could actually get. Trying to find DPRK housing stats and DDG will only give me pages about recent canadian housing news.
+1
I thought about building a network of these to try and avoid rate limits. Not sure how viable that is, maybe its just a host your own type of service.
It’s easy enough to host your own, and if you’re just using it like a normal person you’re not going to hit a rate limit. Goog can’t really tell the difference between you hitting it from a browser vs. you hitting it from searx.
You could probably either proxy outbound requests through a bunch of different boxes if you really wanted to, or maybe there’s some frontend that queries public instances in like a round-robin kind of way (a meta-meta engine, I guess), but honestly I suspect that’s more work than just spinning up your own.
I’m sure it’s a config issue on my part, but I self host it and my internal instance gets like instantly rate limited on a bunch of services, so i often still use public instances since I can’t get a very good breadth of engines on my self host one.
iirc the searx engine config yaml accepts a list of searexes too. Keeping the list updated with working instances is annoying tho. Maybe less annoying with friends so you don’t have to guess about reliability.
That is incredibly useful. I didn’t know it did that but it stands to reason, it’s just another search URL after all. In that case it’d probably be fairly trivial to just scrape the list at searx.space and jam it in the yaml file say once a week.