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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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founded 1 year ago

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[seeking solution] self hosted search engine (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

My latest Google search replacement recently made a decision that basically forces me to turn off ad block in order to click results. I was wondering if there was any self hosted solution that is fairly easy to deploy in TrueNAS scale or if it is even worth doing. Bonus points if it's federated somehow. I'll deal with bad results if it needs time to grow as a project.

I also want to add that what little self hosting I've done so far has felt like cutting out a festering cancer and it feels so good to be in control of my online life again. Thanks so much for the guidance since the Rexxit. Finding out that you could easily self host a Reddit replacement with other people was what got me going to into this to begin with.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

OP isn't asking for a secure search engine though, they're asking for one without ads that they can control themselves. Also while searxng and other meta search engines won't neccesarily protect you from data harvesting they will protect you from tracking cookies and the absolute trash mountain of fake results (imo especially noticeable with google search)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

google's results got so bad recently I had to turn it off in my searxng instance

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Use Yandex.ru, if you are looking for free access to the content in English. https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/nd7w7s/lpt_if_you_cant_find_a_torrent_via_google_because/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

They are explicitly trying to move away from Google, and are looking for a new option because their current solution is forcing them to turn off ad-blocking. Sounds to me like they are looking for a private option. Plus, given the forum in which we are having the discussion (Lemmy), even if OP is not specifically concerned with privacy, it seems likely other users are.

As for cookies, searxng can't do any more than your browser (possibly with extensions) can do, and relying on your browser here is a much better solution, because it protects you on all sites, rather than just on your chosen search engine.

"Trash mountain" results is a whole separate issue - you can certainly tune the results to your liking. But literally the second sentence of their GitHub headline is touting no tracking or profiling, so it seems worth bringing attention to the limitations, and that's all I'm trying to do here.