#OpenSourceDiscovery 88: SearXNG
Internet search aggregator tool
Today I discovered…
SearXNG
An internet metasearch engine that aggregates results from more than 70 search services. It is a fork of Searx (original project not maintained anymore).
💖 What I like about SearXNG:
Diverse results: Seeing results from various search engines in one page and tweaking the SearXNG settings taught me so much about what different search engines offer and to mix those up to make a search result page that removes the blind spots due to single ranking method.
Easy to embed: It was easy to embed the SearchXNG box and customise the experience to make it feel integral part of your app.
👎 What I dislike about SearXNG:
“Too many requests” error: I couldn’t get the
/searchAPI to work at all. Always got the 429 error. Although the experience on browser did not have this issue, but my use case was to use the API only, so the project was not useful as I had expected.Lack documentation: Even after a day of deploying the SearXNG service, it is not clear how does it fetches the search engine results (via scraping or API or both), whether it contains the paid search results or not, etc.
Privacy promises sold to a wrong audience with a strategy that is destined to fail: The project promotes itself heavily centred on the value of protecting the end user privacy from search engine but for whom and with what strategy? They mention following:
“It provides basic privacy by mixing your queries with searches on other platforms without storing search data”.
If the goal is to protect the end user privacy, developers don’t need SearXNG to achieve this goal. And if a developer uses SearXNG but starts tracking the user themselves, what’s the point of the “user privacy” messaging! If you’re hosting it for yourself only, where is the mixing up to protect the privacy! So this “user privacy” logic based on “mixing up” is based on wrong assumptions. It would rather be more productive to focus on providing and talking about how does the Fusion/Ranking process works and different strategies that developers can use.
⭐ Ratings and metrics
Based on my experience, I would rate this project as following
Production readiness: 6/10
Docs rating: 6/10
Time to POC(proof of concept): less than a day
Author: Markus Heiser, Adam Tauber, and others
Demo | Source
(To check out the demo, choose any of the hosted instance on the demo link)
🛡 License: AGPL-3.0
Tech Stack: Python, Shell🗣️ What people say about SearXNG around the web
Help me understand SearXNG, a discussion on Reddit
SearXNG puzzling results, a discussion on Reddit
You can also discuss in response to this post on Substack
If you discovered an interesting Open-Source project and want me to feature it in the newsletter, get in touch via the form above. To support this newsletter and Open-Source authors, follow #OpenSourceDiscovery on LinkedIn and Twitter